CBES increased revenue through customer service intelligence

Major supermarkets across the UK need to keep critical facilities such as air conditioning, fridges, and self-service machines running smoothly. City Building and Engineering Services (CBES), the largest service repair company in the UK, helps these businesses continue to generate revenue with tight service level agreements.

CBES had a data challenge to overcome: a new system was being implemented and they saw an opportunity to create more meaningful data. But they needed a fast and adaptable solution to fit their existing timeline. Furthermore, they were pitching for new business that offered a live operational view between themselves and their prospect.

The Challenge: turning service information into internally and externally visible business intelligence

Information on maintenance and repair was taking too long to arrive, was out of date, and impossible to quantify.

Each quarter CBES would meet with customers to discuss their fixed SLAs (Service Level Agreements) but they never felt like they had a complete data picture to discuss their performance.

CBES found themselves in meetings with customers without the necessary information. Their quarterly performance reports would arrive several weeks later and involve manually extracting data from many different corners of the business. This lack of information in a critical timeline prevented them from optimising their workflow.

SLAs are a key measurement in CBES contracts. They are measured quarterly by customers, but also evaluated vs their competitors’ delivery. Penalties are issued for a failure to meet targets, so it is important to get them right.

Key issues that needed to be addressed:

Preparing information manually led to unhelpful debates about the accuracy
Preparing daily tracking reports required dozens of hours of manual effort per week.
Customers and prospects are now demanding live information

The Solution: live internal and customer workspaces

Matatika connected static data from around the organisation into live workspaces. Where someone had manually extracted the data to email, CBES could now give access to any stakeholder or customers who could see everything in real time. This also had the benefit of being able to see organisational level trends in the data, communicate directly with the operational teams in the secure workspace, and predict ahead.

The data collected included metrics on:

Work orders fixed within 4hr, 8hr, 24hr SLAs
Work orders fixed first visit
Number of jobs assigned but not completed
Number of jobs closed in triage
Number of jobs fixed first time
Number of jobs needing to be revisited
Location of engineers
Amount of engineer travel time
Open jobs, created jobs, and closed jobs trends

All information already in the organisation, but now in a status snapshot at any given moment, as well as a tracker against the metrics over the quarter. E.g: one report alone saved five hours per week of worktime. The reports were also available at the start of the workday. Before they would have to wait for an email. Now they can log in whenever they need to.

CBES now track their SLA target as efficiently as possible. With all the information to hand, accurately demonstrate performance at their quarterly client meetings, but more importantly to manage workload, assess capacity and plan for the future with confidence.

Inspired by the idea of live data reporting and as part of an award-winning pitch, they wanted to demonstrate their commitment to transparency. CBES proposed a step further and agreed to share their data live with the client. The strength of their pitch won them the business and the relationship grew from strength to strength.

Having won the new business, setting up the shared customer workspace took Matatika less than a week to get live.

Result: reliable, robust data with cost and time efficiencies and a 20% increase in turnover year on year.

Matatika’s automated and reliable data collection from Solarvista immediately solved a daily delay in reporting.. It provided account management teams with tremendous confidence in their decisions. Client meetings became more productive as a result and gave CBES the information necessary to challenge any SLA penalties if required.

Secure client workspaces, that allow access to named persons only, has won new business and improved business relations in the new era of hybrid working: everyone sees everything, wherever they are.

Summary:

CBES reports a turnover increase for its Facilities Management arm: 20% yoy as a result of “significant technology investment and new business wins”
Daily reports arrived at start of business – two hours earlier
Two work hours per day were saved collating information
Increase efficiency of engineer deployment by closing more jobs remotely: three to four unnecessary trips eliminated per day