CASE STUDY

Helping Vital Services in Education

The Client – Provides information and support materials to schools, Local Education Authorities and Government – mainly in Information Communication Technologies (ICT).

The Brief – The client would be exhibiting at one of the largest education exhibitions in England, and were worried about being able to cope with the large influx of follow-up enquiries that would be generated by this event. Already dealing with queries from various sources each day, the forecasted rise in this number of queries would cause significant handling problems. Bringing in temporary staff was considered and dismissed by the client, due to the training requirements, and already over-stretched in-house resources. They also eliminated the possibility of taking copies of their brochures to shows – with over 500 products in stock, this would be impractical. The final decision was to outsource to a company that could not only deal with telephone, fax, email and post enquiries, but also be able to accommodate their products in storage, and send out orders that they received.

Action – We designed a database that exactly fitted their need for the enquiries to be recorded, a database which also created anything else that they needed from it, such as showing the number of orders, creating the despatch notes, stock reports and selection instructions. Additionally, it would show the client who their products had been sent to. With this database, the client was easily able to analyse the data. Our Client Services Team were given a fortnight of training, specifically to enable to handle this project and the enquiries smoothly. In the first weeks, 200 orders were received and despatched within two days, as we had agreed with the client.

Conclusion – Upon receipt of the stock, we noticed that a lot of the products looked very alike, which caused some initial concerns re. taking and despatching orders. We addressed this by delivering a ‘product awareness’ programme to the Client Services Team, in order to help them identify the different products with ease. All products were given individual stock codes, and we created a firm rule that orders should only be taken by this reference code. This successfully eradicated the possibility of incorrect products being despatched.

Update – We now process a minimum of 250 orders per month for this client, and anywhere up to 800 orders. These are sent through to us via the client’s web portal which emails to us the requests that it has received. All of these orders are despatched within two days (48 hours), with many being despatched on the same day as we receive the order – this has no extra cost implication to the client. Three years later with this client and we are still constantly looking to improve our services to them, and to meet their changing needs.