Next week, the annual DCM Awards will take place. I am really happy that our customer Mensura is on the shortlist in the category ‘Intelligent capturing’. This case is a good example of how reducing paper in administrative workflows impacts customer experience.
Mensura and their ICT history
Mensura is Belgium’s largest external service for prevention and protection at work. They are not a typical example of a company with a lot of transactional communications and business correspondence, like we see in banking or utilities. But even in an atypical market as theirs there is a lot to gain.
Over the last couple of years, the company has become the market leader. Different acquisitions and fusions resulted in huge ICT projects with a focus on consolidation and data migration. Years went by without room for innovation and ICT had not been aligned with business for many years. The ICT landscape was very fragmented. Software was selected for each project individually: e-invoicing, mobile app development, contracts etc. This resulted in inefficiency and overhead in costs and maintenance. ICT was increasingly viewed as a cost center.
ICT as business enabler
On top of that we see the role of ICT teams is changing: from a pure internal focus on infrastructure and operations to a more external focus on improving customer experience and enabling business. This is also true for the ICT team at Mensura. And one of the areas that needed an innovation boost was how to better support their prevention consultants.
The many manual handling and the paperwork slowed down the efficiency of the consultants. They are usually on the road and during the whole day they have a suitcase filled with a laptop, paper documentation, and forms. A consultant is not always online when doing company visits, so it was not possible to update the business systems in real-time. During their visits the consultants have to make notes which, once they arrived at the office, have to be re-processed in the different business systems. Double work and a bad, cumbersome user experience. If this workflow could be digitized, the benefits would be huge. The goal was one digital mobile application to enable prevention consultants to inform themselves and to simplify, speed up, and make their administration paperless.
Mobile experience
In most companies mobile is seen as a separate silo owned by marketing. But I believe it should be part of the overall communication strategy, since it has become one of the most important customer touch points. Mensura shared that insight. They chose to implement Scriptura Engage as a central customer communications management platform. The mobile application for their consultants is an integral part of the CCM system. This way they centralize as much as possible instead of a further fragmentation of functions.
And with excellent results: the consultant arrives with the latest information on his tablet. They can consult offline customer data in different languages, customize and fill out an electronic checklist together with the customer. This information is – as soon as the user is back online – automatically synchronized with the backend systems. So the course of a company visit has become much more efficient. Paperless. This has a positive impact on Mensura’s brand, resulting in a customer loyalty.
Mensura can maintain the whole application (including the mobile data capture) without being dependent on third parties. Several team members of the administration team could be assigned to other tasks. And any communication that needs to be created following the company visit is delivered through the same CCM platform.
So in the first place it was a project to improve customer experience for the internal customer, but it also improved the experience for the external client. Everybody happy!
I keep my fingers crossed for next week’s award ceremony! Go go go Mensura!
Next week, the annual DCM Awards will take place. I am really happy that our customer Mensura is on the shortlist in the category ‘Intelligent capturing’. This case is a good example of how reducing paper in administrative workflows impacts customer experience.
Mensura and their ICT history
Mensura is Belgium’s largest external service for prevention and protection at work. They are not a typical example of a company with a lot of transactional communications and business correspondence, like we see in banking or utilities. But even in an atypical market as theirs there is a lot to gain.
Over the last couple of years, the company has become the market leader. Different acquisitions and fusions resulted in huge ICT projects with a focus on consolidation and data migration. Years went by without room for innovation and ICT had not been aligned with business for many years. The ICT landscape was very fragmented. Software was selected for each project individually: e-invoicing, mobile app development, contracts etc. This resulted in inefficiency and overhead in costs and maintenance. ICT was increasingly viewed as a cost center.
ICT as business enabler
On top of that we see the role of ICT teams is changing: from a pure internal focus on infrastructure and operations to a more external focus on improving customer experience and enabling business. This is also true for the ICT team at Mensura. And one of the areas that needed an innovation boost was how to better support their prevention consultants.
The many manual handling and the paperwork slowed down the efficiency of the consultants. They are usually on the road and during the whole day they have a suitcase filled with a laptop, paper documentation, and forms. A consultant is not always online when doing company visits, so it was not possible to update the business systems in real-time. During their visits the consultants have to make notes which, once they arrived at the office, have to be re-processed in the different business systems. Double work and a bad, cumbersome user experience. If this workflow could be digitized, the benefits would be huge. The goal was one digital mobile application to enable prevention consultants to inform themselves and to simplify, speed up, and make their administration paperless.
Mobile experience
In most companies mobile is seen as a separate silo owned by marketing. But I believe it should be part of the overall communication strategy, since it has become one of the most important customer touch points. Mensura shared that insight. They chose to implement Scriptura Engage as a central customer communications management platform. The mobile application for their consultants is an integral part of the CCM system. This way they centralize as much as possible instead of a further fragmentation of functions.
And with excellent results: the consultant arrives with the latest information on his tablet. They can consult offline customer data in different languages, customize and fill out an electronic checklist together with the customer. This information is – as soon as the user is back online – automatically synchronized with the backend systems. So the course of a company visit has become much more efficient. Paperless. This has a positive impact on Mensura’s brand, resulting in a customer loyalty.
Mensura can maintain the whole application (including the mobile data capture) without being dependent on third parties. Several team members of the administration team could be assigned to other tasks. And any communication that needs to be created following the company visit is delivered through the same CCM platform.
So in the first place it was a project to improve customer experience for the internal customer, but it also improved the experience for the external client. Everybody happy!
I keep my fingers crossed for next week’s award ceremony! Go go go Mensura!