Capita transforms customer service and empowers agents

Capita Software takes a more strategic approach to customer service to delight customers and empower staff, while consolidating customer service teams onto a central platform and enabling more self-serve capabilities. 

Streamlining customer support

Every day, millions of people interact with a Capita Group product or service. The company provides consultancy, transformation, and digital services, delivering innovative solutions to transform and simplify the links between businesses and customers, and government and citizens. Capita Software provides application software and other solutions to clients in the local government, emergency services, healthcare, utilities and energy, professional and financial services, and payments sectors.

Building the right foundations

Capita Software supports some of the most crucial services in the UK – from enabling emergency services to respond rapidly to callouts, to ensuring children get a good education. With a strong and diverse product offering, its support teams are highly skilled and have an extensive knowledge of niche markets. However, to support such a large range of products, the company was operating 26 independent service desks with 23 ticketing tools serving seven different business units. 

“Customer support had become really complex – if a customer used two of our products, they’d need to speak to two different service desks,” recalls Michael Noonan, Divisional Transformation and Operations Officer at Capita Software.

As well as being frustrating for customers, the approach was affecting staff. “One agent could have hundreds of open tickets. It was totally overwhelming and with such unique products, the domain knowledge that our staff have is our most valuable asset,” explains Simon Brunger, Support Director.

The company decided to simplify and standardize its approach to customer support under tight timescales to ensure it could delight customers and improve the agent experience.

Working better together

Capita Software went to market to find a strategic partner to bring its vision to life. “We wanted more than just the vendor who scored highest in the Gartner Magic Quadrant, we needed someone to work with our team to deliver the best possible outcome,” adds Simon. 

ServiceNow® Customer Service Management had all of the out-of-the-box functionality to standardize and centralize the company’s disparate service desks quickly and effectively. But it was the team’s enthusiasm for the project that made ServiceNow stand out.

Michael continues, “We got buy-in from high-level stakeholders within our business. They all thought I was mad to try and get the implementation done in 20 weeks, but they [ServiceNow] blew my expectations out of the water by getting it finished in just 17 weeks.” 

Keeping things simple

The team’s vision had three main goals: to simplify services for customers, strengthen the agent experience, and succeed in delivering proactive support. The first step was to consolidate more than 290 agents working across 26 service desks into one team, with one data set, and one case management solution.

Capita Software designed a ‘minimal lovable product’ on Customer Service Management, including a service portal to log cases, a community where customers could ask questions, and an extensive knowledge library. This significantly reduced the volume of cases, leaving agents free to handle higher level queries, and gave them better access to the information they needed to resolve them. Reducing peaks in demand and response times improved the customer experience but also, crucially, reduced pressure on the support team, meeting the two main drivers behind the transformation of CX (customer experience) and EX (employee experience).

“It’s easy to get lost in meetings hammering out every tiny detail, but in my experience, users might not even notice those things,” Simon explains. “By getting the minimum essential functionality in place, we hit our deadline, rolled it out to our first set of customers, and used their feedback to take it to the next stage.”

Since go-live, an intense focus on Knowledge Management has increased the number of knowledge articles available to both customers and employees from 3,500 to more than 27,000. But giving customers the power to self-serve required a big cultural shift for Capita Software, as Michael explains:

“There’s no point in having people phoning us with issues that we already know about. By taking the plunge and publishing articles that a search engine can bring up, we’re actually empowering people to fix things quickly and easily and taking a more proactive approach.”

Between January and July 2020, knowledge article views rose from 20,000 to 75,000 per month. In all, two million knowledge articles were viewed in the 12-month period to March 2021.

Meeting targets and delighting customers

The phased roll-out started with 2,500 customers in August 2019. In the first 100 days, portal usage increased by 30% and it’s now the primary channel for customers – with 7,000 cases raised every month.

Today, the customer-facing portal has been rebranded in Capita’s colors and customer engagement has become a more personalized experience, for example, with contextual search capabilities and featured or popular relevant articles prominently displayed on the dashboard. It supports 90,000 customers with 700 active threads in the portal’s community.

Customer community forums are also a major growth area. From a single forum for the education sector, there are now forums for numerous professions, including healthcare, revenue and benefits, housing, and local government, all showing healthy levels of engagement.

And use of a virtual agent service is expanding steadily too, with 2,500 contacts per month and positive feedback from customers.

An integrated survey is sent to customers when their support case is resolved to capture feedback and identify areas for continuous improvement. Reporting timelines are greatly reduced, giving the team real-time information and insights into performance. While employee satisfaction has rocketed to 85%, perhaps the most telling indicator of success is the company’s NPS (Net Promoter Score – a measure of customer loyalty or customer satisfaction) rating.

“We started with an NPS score of +2. In June 2020 that hit +52 – that’s a best-in-class rating and we couldn’t be prouder,” says Simon.

Recognizing and rewarding talent

One of the goals of the transformation was to highlight the importance of Capita Software’s skilled and hard-working staff. With agents freed up to focus on more complex cases, they’re getting company-wide recognition, and 42 of the team have been promoted internally already.

“When I come to work, I feel valued, and that’s how I wanted the service agents to feel,” explains Michael. “This is a brilliant company to work for, and now we’ve shown our customer service team just how much we appreciate their hard work.”

The transformation has also inspired the system administrator team to confidently present ideas for future innovation, and having smashed the 20-week implementation target, the model is being used as a best practice approach elsewhere in the business.

“We set out to give customers high-quality customer support to match our industry-leading products. Our partnership with ServiceNow helped us deliver on that goal and exceed our own expectations,” concludes Michael. “And crucially, what we have created is a standard platform for customer software support that can be applied throughout the Capita organization.”

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