Sustainable digital transformation for a UK-based HR and health & safety services provider.

Supporting rapid growth through digital transformation and technology innovation

Our client’s growth journey began in earnest in 2012, following its acquisition by a private equity firm. The investor saw that the growth path required an overhaul of the group’s web platform, which provides self-service tools and materials to help clients with employment law, and health and safety. The platform, hosted on a legacy ASP model, was not scalable to support growth.

As the technology partner managing the legacy platform, the client invited us to recommend a roadmap for transformation. We conducted a complete enterprise architecture assessment and proposed a new architecture and governance model aligned with the client’s business objectives. In 2015, we began the client’s journey toward total digital transformation.

Since then, we have been instrumental in developing the client’s core service delivery platform. Initially, that involved rebuilding the platform with multi-tenant architecture on Microsoft Azure and migrating legacy data.

Introducing SaaS platform and new cloud services for legacy system modernization

One of our foremost objectives as our client’s strategic technology partner was to elevate the group’s core customer-facing web platform. The existing ASP platform was not scalable and could not meet the client’s growth objectives. The service offerings were not differentiated, and client documentation was cumbersome to manage.

The sure-fire solution was legacy system modernization that would be scalable enough to give each client a single portal to enlist existing and new services, including HR management tools, employment law factsheets, and templates, and health and safety assessments and checklists. The group also wanted to speed up end-client onboarding, efficiently manage their documentation, and track client journeys.

Our approach was to rebuild the platform as a highly scalable, multi-tenant SaaS solution on Microsoft Azure, with an intuitive portal interface for clients that include secure single sign-on. We migrated existing users onto the new platform and developed new modules for holidays, absence, E-learning, health, and safety risk assessments, and many more.

Reducing the cost of site audits by 25% through an offline web application

A core part of the group’s service offering involves conducting health and safety audits at the customer site. Consultants capture information onsite, including questionnaire responses and photographs, and then use this information to produce an audit report for the client.

The group wanted to accelerate the process of producing the reports, improve productivity and deliver better customer service through faster turnarounds. Our solution was transforming the existing audit app into a progressive web application (PWA) that works offline.

The new app allows consultants to collect data, upload photos, annotate, and produce reports onsite with the customer. Once back online, the application syncs with the core platform’s CouchDB database, preserving the data and information for future access by the consultant and the client. We also developed an admin portal that allows the group to manage access and authentication for the app.

Handling a 6x increase in inquiries during COVID-19 with an intelligent chatbot

When COVID-19 hit, the group experienced a 6x increase in inquiries from anxious end-clients, ranging from ‘how to furlough employees’ to ‘how to make their workplace COVID-safe.’ Having initially laid off its employees, the company struggled to handle the increased volume of inbound calls.

Fortunately, we had already been working with our client to prototype an intelligent chatbot for the core platform, and we could turn the proof of concept into a fully-fledged working bot in just a couple of weeks. Built with the Microsoft Bot Framework and trained using Microsoft Q&A Maker, the bot could answer many fundamental questions, relieving pressure on the contact center

Since the successful chatbot implementation, we have expanded its knowledge base using ValueLabs’ DAN neural search to find answers in unstructured documents. Today, the bot can resolve over 65% of the queries it receives without recourse to a human agent, which continues to increase as we refine it. Moreover, the bot is available to all 300,000 users of our client’s HR and health and safety services – not just to the designated contacts for each client, as was previously the case.

Enabling real-time monitoring of sales performance with interactive dashboards

Our client was on an ambitious growth trajectory, so they kept a watchful eye on sales performance. They needed a fail-safe data analytics platform for the group to monitor sales cycles in real-time. In response, we developed a solution that provides insight into factors such as progress against targets, deal velocity, and stalled opportunities.

We re-designed the existing data layer to meet these requirements and built highly visual and interactive reporting dashboards using Tableau to visualize the status of sales KPIs. In addition to the dashboards, we designed and produced pixel-perfect reports for offline distribution to sales representatives.

Today, group executives and sales managers can monitor the sales cycle in near-real time, with data accurate to 15 minutes. Sales representatives, meanwhile, are empowered with up-to-date data, allowing them to focus on the right opportunities and take the right actions to meet their targets.

Enabling a 10% revenue increase with a 360-degree customer view in Salesforce Sales Cloud

Every company acquired by the group brings new customers and opportunities to cross-sell and upsell relevant services from different business divisions. The client was looking for a Salesforce consulting expertise and we seemed the right fit. To maximize sale opportunities and realize technical efficiencies, we implemented Salesforce Sales Cloud for sales and marketing across all new group companies that weren’t already using Salesforce.

Our work involved defining a governance model, managing the data migration, developing custom functionalities required by individual group companies, conducting end-to-end testing, and handling GDPR compliance. We soon had a standard process to swiftly migrate new acquisitions.

We began with integrating all those implementations into one , providing the group with a 360-degree view of each customer. It allowed easy identification and management of up-sell and cross-sell opportunities. Automating lead generation processes through Salesforce enabled a 10% increase in productivity and supported a 10% uplift in overall group revenue.