MITIE Cleaning choose Serversys to help plan, design and implement a new CRM infrastructure

MITIE Cleaning is one of the UK’s leading service companies. With an exceptionally diverse range of public and private sector clients, MITIE Cleaning operates in specialist environments including nuclear power stations, airports, hospitals, the London Eye and the Houses of Parliament. It also cleans high street branch environments for retailers and banks.

Prior to implementing Sage CRM Mid-Market Edition, the company’s regional operating model hampered its ability to measure service delivery consistency across the business. Each region managed its own local customer contacts and assessing service performance required the laborious manual collation of spreadsheets and monthly customer satisfaction questionnaires. Reliance on paper-based reporting and regional ACT databases also made the timely and effective monitoring of prestigious national accounts difficult. MITIE Cleaning wanted to gain a holistic view of its customers, along with an effective performance reporting framework.

Mark Hazelwood, Operations Director, Miworld at MITIE explains the challenge:

“Our objective was to increase individual contract profitability by improving operational efficiency. Using enhanced customer relationship management would enable us to initiate proactive customer interventions, which in turn would leverage improved contract retention rates.

By automating our customer survey process we could monitor, escalate and respond to service performance issues and provide incisive reporting for regional managers. While we knew we had a deficiency in CRM, the investment involved— including the cultural change of moving to an account based model—meant we needed to initiate functionality in a phased manner, introducing new business practices as and when the business was ready for them.”

Key Achievements

Customer E-Perception Surveys Automation of national account customer perception provides timely, accurate data on operational performance and issues, together with detailed management reporting.

Improved Customer Retention
Performance monitoring tools escalate SLA issues to management and enable faster response to customers. New proactive CRM behaviours are generating higher customer satisfaction levels.

Single Integrated View of Customers
The Sage CRM MME central database provides a global view of accounts and individual contacts. Action points can be pro-actively identified and progress monitored.

New Customer Support Centre
A fully integrated call centre was created in just six weeks, complete with escalation processes, call management systems and a complete view of all customer interactions.

Shaping the vision

Scoping the system requirements was a daunting prospect. MITIE sought a partner to help shape the platform capable of supporting the company’s future business vision.

“From the start, Serversys impressed us with their ‘can do, will do’ attitude. We outlined the core functionality we required—a centralised customer database to drive key CRM initiatives and operational performance reporting for the business. We needed a system that could tick several boxes,”

says Hazelwood.

The initial specification process was crucial if MITIE Cleaning was to achieve its long-term business objectives. Serversys worked closely with the IT team to define the database structure, refine data capture parameters and ultimately undertook the entire system design process.

“Serversys invested time in learning our business, mapping every process and getting to the heart of our operations,”

confirms Hazelwood.

“They also shared with us best practice recommendations that ultimately helped to characterise our customer-centric vision.”

Serversys recommended Sage CRM MME as the strongest CRM technology in four primary areas: web delivery, remote access, scalability and price.

As Hazelwood says:

“Along with the adaptability to support a changing business model, Sage CRM MME met another key requirement. As a thin client solution, it would contain the support burden on our IT department— essential as our distributed end-user base has a huge variance in IT literacy levels.”

A new way of working

Implementation and configuration of the system went smoothly. Serversys took just days to populate the central customer database, importing and cleaning data from an array of disbursed repositories. Today MITIE Cleaning uses Sage CRM MME to e-survey around a thousand national account customer contacts every month.

The move to automated customer e-surveys and e-performance management has already generated significant gains.

Mark Hazelwood explains:

“In the initial Midlands regional trial we were able to identify customer issues and respond in just 48 hours—something that previously could have taken weeks. Customers were extremely positive about our inclusive approach—indeed, it’s subsequently proved to be a real competitive differentiator.”

Automating the customer perception survey process removed a huge administrative overhead from the business. Account managers now focus on more strategic activities, while rules-based escalation processes trigger responses to customer issues or concerns.

“We now have accurate and timely performance reporting across the business,”

confirms Hazelwood.

“Sage CRM MME gives us powerful tools to leverage improved responsiveness to customers and gain early indications of SLA issues. For the first time we have a national measure of global customer satisfaction and operational performance.”

About MITIE

The management and staff of MITIE own approximately 25% of the company’s share capital. MITIE (Management Incentive Through Investment Equity) was founded by David Telling in 1987 and today MITIE Group PLC, of which MITIE Cleaning is a major discipline, employs around 32,000 people across the UK.

The next challenge

Relocating the customer support centre from Scotland to Bristol was the next challenge for Serversys. In just six weeks MITIE Cleaning wanted to replace its existing stand-alone system with a fully integrated solution to further enforce its new proactive management culture and gain a single view of the customer. The new system had to be capable of flagging customer SLA issues, initiating escalations to regional managers.

“We bombarded Serversys with ideas which they took in their stride. In just weeks they configured a fully integrated call centre solution using the core functionality within Sage CRM MME,”

explains Hazelwood.

“From auto call recognition, to pre-formatted email imports which remove the need for agents to re-key information, to escalations and real-time call centre performance reporting, Serversys helped ensure every aspect of any customer interaction became a value-add”

Using Sage CRM MME, MITIE Cleaning can now provide an out-of-hours service in the customer support centre. Serversys created an interface so data from Sage CRM MME can be exported with ease.

“Outsourcing this function alone represents a £60,000 annual saving for the company,”

said Hazelwood.

For MITIE Cleaning, the next phase of CRM implementation is currently under review.

“The business has undergone a massive change in an extremely short time frame,”

confirms Hazelwood.

“But the collaborative and fully accountable approach adopted by Serversys made the evolution to a new platform painless, while helping us drive forward with our new business model.”,

concludes Hazelwood.

MITIE said:

“While other providers may understand software, they don’t understand how to harness an application to the real world. Serversys, however, were different. From the start they demonstrated a clear and concise understanding of our business and our vision of a truly customer-centric way of working. With their help we’ve surmounted the commercial challenges of implementing an integrated CRM infrastructure as we make the transition to a completely new business model.”

Mark Hazelwood, Operations Director, Miworld at MITIE