Crown Commercial Service
Crown Commercial Service Builds Digital Foundation to Support Procurement Growth Strategy
Leading Public Sector Procurement
Operational Excellence in Central and Local Government
CCS supports the public sector to achieve maximum commercial value when procuring common goods and services. In 2019/20, CCS helped the public sector to achieve commercial benefits worth more than £1 billion - supporting world-class public services that offer the best value for taxpayers.
Strategy Led By Design
In support of the synchronization of both the customer experience and technology, Salesforce was initially implemented to enhance CCS standard operations by leveraging the standard database functionality. Although 90% of the business was using Salesforce, they were predominantly on Classic (Salesforce’s former user-interface) which had been heavily customized. In addition, Google sheets and Excel spreadsheets were being utilized to document customer interactions from one business area to the next.
“We were kind of tripping over ourselves and speaking to the same customers about the same things, due to not knowing how the other areas of the business were operating. We lacked a central location to store customer engagement and pipeline information which contributed to our lack of visibility”, explained Shanie Dean, Customer Experience Performance Lead at CCS.
The CCS team began to brainstorm ways to facilitate internal alignment. A user-forum was launched that consisted of representatives from various parts of the business. The collaborative network produced a design for what each business processes should be, and how technology would support operational efficiency. “It became an iterative process. We developed a proof of concept and launched a pilot program,” said Heidi Stone, Head of Operations (CXD) at CCS. “We worked in sprints, strategised a rollout plan, and initiated a pilot with our primary function of ‘leads and opportunities’”.
During this strategic planning phase, the CCS team also decided to upgrade from Salesforce Classic to Salesforce Lightning, taking advantage of the opportunity to provide a clean slate for the new vision. “We were very clear about the design principles. We learned from our experience with Salesforce Classic that we had customized it so much that we didn't receive any of the benefits that came with system updates. We made a deliberate decision to proceed with the out-of-the-box functionality so that we could benefit from the future updates that Salesforce would provide,” explained Nichol.
Unlocking Visibility and Leveraging Insights
The iterative design process led to the team’s re-platformed their CRM on the Salesforce Customer 360 for Government, and expanded the scope to operationalise more than just the procurement process. It bridges the gaps between people and process, giving the CCS team the ability to tailor their CRM strategy to cater to the unique workflows for each business area:
- Accounts Management Team: Sales Cloud enables this team to work proactively on leads and opportunities for new business while maintaining relationships with existing customers. The core business functionality is tracking customer engagement and pipeline management.
- Procurement Operations: With the help of Service Cloud, Procurement Operations manages customer enquiries and fulfillment request(s). It also serves as the key record for customer account management activities within the purchasing and supplying aspects of the business.
- Marketing Team: Pardot supports the Marketing Team's customer strategy. It's predominantly used for automated marketing of newsletters.
- Customer Service: This team also leverages Service Cloud to manage cases and enquiries from customers whether they be through e-mail or by phone. Knowledge empowers customer service with the best resolutions to provide optimum support. Once the opportunity gets to a certain point, it would be sent to a Commercial Specialist or an Individual Account owner to manage the customer relationship all within Service Cloud.
- Real time data visibility: “The integrated dashboards have provided visibility into the overall business operations and prompted discussion around roles, responsibilities and process improvements,” explained Stone. “This helps people see who's working with different customers and who's engaged with them. Approximately, 89% of our team logged into Salesforce last month across our organization in support of customer engagement, account management and procurement operations.”
“We were always very conscious to keep our business processes first and the system second. Salesforce is our hub and our nucleus in which our business processes are aligned,” said Nichol. By bridging the gap between people and process, the CCS team has been able to garner the kind of data-driven insights that come from unlocking real-time visibility of the business.
Seeing the Big Picture Impact
The number of opportunities managed by the CCS Team has also increased from 2700 at the start of 2020/2021 to 9500 at the start of 2021/2022. This provides further insight into which areas of the business are incurring the most traction and where the next layer of support should begin. “A really good example of the solution's impact is around COVID-19. Because we had all the customer data in Salesforce, we could quickly track customer engagement activities -- which we initially struggled with prior to the system being in place,” said Dean. “Overall, we’ve been able to support customer engagement due to the visibility provided through pipeline management”.
It is the CCS team’s commitment to service and their customers that has been the motivating factor to process improvement. “We remained committed to our design principles. We had a four-part design plan consisting of our people, process, knowledge, and technology,” said Nichol. “Technology was core to achieve the transparency and the growth that’s currently being realised. That made this more than just a Salesforce project. It was a customer engagement and CRM project. It is my advice for any agency or business, as part of their overall business strategy, to get a system that is really effective in achieving your long-term goals.”
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