Lessons from NCC in Blazing Business Trail
Customer centricity is a topic of much debate lately – with a staggering increase of operations being pushed to digital in the past year, how can brands shape their digital process to be Customer-centric and drive value and retention?
CloudShift recently took part in a podcast series produced by Salesforce with our Customer NCC (which you can listen to here) to discuss what Customer-centricity means to them. The podcast series is called Blazing Business Trails, featuring Calvin Tahari and Sarah Paul as co-hosts. Together, along with industry experts, analysts and people from the business services sector, they look at key issues and trends for those within business and professional services, legal, real estate, recruitment and educational services.
In this episode, CloudShift’s Delivery Director Giles Sams joined Danny Owens from NCC to discuss Customer centricity and the NCC experience and POV. In this post, we are going to give you four lessons learned from the NCC success story and their digital transformation journey.
NCC’s journey towards Customer centricity
NCC’s journey started about two years ago when their new CEO joined the business, pioneering the launch of a program branded ‘securing growth together’ – a self-help program from within the business, aiming to rationalise, centralise and unite many different functions and business units in different geographies.
NCC has grown massively in the past 10-15 years and have accumulated different legacy systems and wanted to bring all business units into using the same system and decided on implementing Salesforce. Here’s when CloudShift came in, to help NCC on their journey to understand how they could start to realise the benefits of tools like Salesforce and MuleSoft amongst their own procedural changes and cultural shift.
Let’s take a look at what lessons have been learnt along the road to implementing a customer-centric strategy…
Put your Customers front and centre
What does customer centricity mean? For NCC it is about making sure that the Customers are front and centre of everything they do. And they do this by getting to know their Customers as much as they can: fix they assess the technology environments, the supply chains, their assets so that NCC can determine the efficiency of their cyber resilience. And in that way, NCC can really help and support the improvement and implementation of solutions that meet those requirements in both a strategic and tactical mindset.
Audit your current processes
Technology aside, the first thing to consider is what are your business requirements and what you are trying to achieve. In NCC’s case, there was an overarching desire to implement systems processes and adopt a set of checks that would abide by their overarching strategy and align with their key values. So how do you get started? Map the overarching process and strategy and identify where you’re trying to get to, identify internal owners, which approvals are needed, and what checks are in place both commercial and technical. In NCC’s case, that gave them a very strong alignment between different countries and business units, allowing them to achieve a process harmonisation and true Customer 360.
Find your Trailblazers
NCC looked inside their organisation to find their own champions of change before reaching out to CloudShift. They adopted a self-help program whereby they looked internally to their own leaders and employees to really built a team who know and understand their values as well as operational and strategic aims. From there they built a program of transformation around those systems processes and bring it all back together from the different organisations that effectively used to make up NCC.
One voice across all channels
The main benefit of NCC’s Salesforce implementation is that now they have everybody using the same CRM platform. How does that translate to their customers’ experience? Customers now hear one voice from the entire organisation. NCC’s growth over the years has resulted in a number of different divisions and business units around the world each with different specialisms, whether that’s cybersecurity or software resilience etc. so, what’s really important is that irrespective of where Customers are, who they’re speak in to, they are hearing that same voice.
Digital transformation has been a buzzword for the last decade but many businesses have been fast-tracked in their digital journey in the past year as a direct consequence of the global pandemic.
COVID-19 has been the kickstarter for many companies to move to a more digital infrastructure and more automated processes between different functions.
Here at CloudShift we are expert in business change and providing businesses with a smooth transition to cloud-based solutions and we would love to answer any questions you may have to help you shape a roadmap for your 2021 digital transformation plans. Reach out to hello@cloudshiftgroup.com for more information and check out more resources available on our website.
