Challenge:
SSE Enterprise Telecoms is the telecommunications business of the energy sector specialist Scottish & Southern Electric. As the organisation’s business model had evolved and customer base grown, it had reached a point where its data maturity and sales order and delivery processes needed to match the growth ambitions of the organisation.
SSE had identified its legacy CRM was hindering progress and working against the bottom line. Made up of multiple, disparate systems including spreadsheets, incumbent processes were inefficient, did not communicate in a common language and were increasingly time and resource consuming. SSE required a system that would enable it to ‘know its customer’, support cross-sell and provide senior leadership with the key performance metrics to accelerate the next phase of transformational growth.
Solution:
Piran was engaged to support SSE’s wider transformation project, working with Microsoft Consulting, as part of SSE’s migration to Microsoft Dynamics. A key starting point for any CRM migration is to ‘know your data’. SSE’s data – a legacy of its growth until then – was unstructured and sitting across multiple information sources. This was established with the production of a data dictionary, providing detailed information about the data, its source, its location, and its relationship with other data artefacts, ahead of the subsequent extract, transform, load (ETL) activities. This initial investigation provided the starting point to communicate with internal and external SSE stakeholders ahead of the migration.
In parallel, we structured SSE’s existing enterprise telecom product portfolio of ethernet, fibre and customer premise equipment services to align with the new CRM product catalogue requirements, introducing clear definitions of SSE’s product and services, their configurable attributes and standardised pricing and discounting models. We also undertook multiple business process workshops, bringing together the whole SSE Enterprise Telecom team, to collaboratively identify the ‘as is’ and ‘to be’ sales order processes – which were required by Microsoft to configure the initial set-up of the CRM. A major part of this work was supported by business psychologists with the aim of creating a ‘one team’ mindset between the internal sales, order processing, technical design, operational and delivery teams.
Finally, no transformation project is complete without putting in place appropriate performance metrics. SSE’s legacy KPIs were often out-of-date and inaccurate. By adopting a ‘whole of customer lifecycle’ approach new automated KPIs were introduced to measure sales velocity and profitability, providing the leadership team with the means to guide and grow the business.
Outcome:
In a nine-month period, Piran’s team of skilled data professionals undertook an extremely complex data migration, helping the organisation transform to new ways of working with more efficient automated and measurable processes, better collaboration, coupled with a business-wide adoption of data best practice.
With the project completed, SSE’s new CRM facilitated a better, friction-free, customer journey supporting quoting, order management, customer onboarding and up-sell. SSE was also able to measure its performance with increased accuracy, manage business processes with greater clarity and significantly reduce the ‘sale lead to first invoice’ time.
