Business Link for London
Increased customer satisfaction and secure archiving from a content management solution
Company Profile
Business Link for London provides advice to London's small and medium-sized businesses. Its team of mobile business advisers rely on up-to-date customer relationship management (CRM) information to deliver the best service.
Customer's Business Issues
One major challenge for Business Link for London was to keep CRM systems aligned with business growth and performance targets. By early 2003, it was clear that the organisation’s existing CRM system was struggling to support the increasing number of customers.
Richard Pemberton, head of ICT, Business Link for London, says: “Our previous system simply couldn’t keep pace with our growth and organisational restructuring. The IT infrastructure wasn’t flexible enough to meet the increased pressure.”
More importantly, there was a real risk that the old system would prevent Business Link for London from meeting targets set by the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI). Pemberton says: “Our target was to reach 90,000 businesses, including 20,000 pre-start businesses, during 2004/5. To achieve this we needed to make better use of our existing resources, in particular our mobile workforce, while providing a low cost solution for our London Business Support Network partners.”
Workforce mobility was a key issue in this challenge. In the past, business advisers had to spend a significant amount of time in the office, entering and downloading information into the CRM system. Home access was problematic, as only a dial-up system was available and connection to the system was slow, unreliable and potentially insecure.
Pemberton says: “Our advisers need to spend as much time as possible with clients and prospective clients adding customer value. We wanted to find a way of giving them secure, remote access to the system from home so that they didn’t waste time going back and forth to the office. As well as providing better customer service, this increased efficiency will also help to reduce costs.”
Business Link needed a solution that was user friendly and supported by broadband access. Speed of implementation was also an important factor so the organisation could start moving towards its 2004/5 targets as quickly as possible.
Business Link has worked with Logicalis for a number of years on projects such as implementing a Citrix server-based computing environment and disaster recovery strategy. When Business Link for London realised that it needed to improve its CRM system Logicalis was the natural choice as technology partner.
The Logicalis Solution
Logicalis recommended and deployed an infrastructure to support the new PeopleSoft CRM system (named TAG) behind the existing Citrix interface. This transformed the business, swiftly yielding benefits for business advisers, and enabling the organisation to meet DTI targets and improve customer satisfaction.
Logicalis recommended running the PeopleSoft CRM solution on clustered HP DL580 servers and an HP MSA 1000 SAN. The other solution components are a Citrix Metaframe XPe environment, a Cisco firewall and RSA's secure authorisation technology for remote access.
Logicalis chose a solution that perfectly matched the agency's development goals and integrated TAG with the company's existing Citrix environment to create a user-friendly, remotely accessible solution. With this solution, Business Link for London met its DTI targets for 2003/4, and is on track to meet its future targets.
Pemberton says: “Logicalis was able to implement the solution in a matter of weeks, so we saw benefits quickly. This, combined with the operational efficiency of the system, meant we met our DTI targets ahead of schedule. The fact that we were able to achieve this while implementing a new system is in itself a testimony to the success of TAG. ”
Why Logicalis?
Logicalis was instrumental in developing a solution that worked seamlessly with Admiral's in-house bespoke business applications
The solution provided a manageable environment that did not require an increase in manpower, enabling staff to concentrate on true customer service.
According to Steve Carnell, "Admiral have been working with Logicalis since 1994 with the same group of consultants. They know our business inside out and provide a level of continuity that it would be very difficult to replace with another supplier.
Logicalis work very closely with our internal development team and have provided an excellent system that fully meets our needs, works without disruption and most importantly fits perfectly into our existing business operations."
