City & Guilds is the UK`s leading provider of vocational training, offering more than 500 courses and spanning 22 industry sectors. Since 1997, City & Guilds has provided training in more than 100 countries, including the Pacific region, Malaysia, South China and Africa. It has 8 500 approved centres worldwide.
The challenge
With more than lb50 million in annual revenue and nearly 600 employees, City & Guilds runs a network of nine regional offices in England, and national offices in Edinburgh, Belfast and Cardiff. Its customers are higher education colleges, businesses, private training providers, universities, the armed forces and various public sector bodies.
When City & Guilds became inundated with queries regarding the availability of local courses, it recognised the need for a customer response tool to help manage the volume of traffic. City & Guilds designed a response centre to handle inquiries, but it still needed the right technology to provide the staff with relevant and easily accessible information.
The CA solution
First, City & Guilds consolidated information from different data sources into a data mart. It then evaluated a range of different business intelligence tools before opting for CleverPath Forest & Trees from Computer Associates International, Inc (CA). CleverPath Forest & Trees was the perfect choice because the technology focuses on delivering the right information to the right people at the right time. The CleverPath Forest & Trees development environment let City & Guilds` IT staff build analytics applications with screen-based views of information they want to access, while at the same time letting them generate customised reports.
"We wanted a tool that would help us improve our customer service and provide faster telephone response times," said Graham Clements, Business Systems Consultant at City & Guilds.
City & Guilds` response centre staff now use CleverPath Forest & Trees to access and display course information, schemes and awards from colleges and training providers as well as sales and stock control, supply pricing and publication details.
"If someone phones and says they`d like to do photography at such-and-such a level, we can refer them to the nearest centre offering that course," Clements said. "The system is quite powerful in providing an immediate public service."
CleverPath Forest & Trees also gives staff the ability to search by different criteria, such as post codes, course title and centre. They can also see how active a centre is and how many candidates are going through it. "CleverPath Forest & Trees has given us a very customisable and friendly user interface that is very flexible. We can set our own standards, which isn`t necessarily true of other development environments where you must use specific toolbars, whether you want them or not," Clements said.
Clements was impressed with the speed at which it was possible to develop an application using CleverPath Forest & Trees. "One of the reasons we chose CleverPath Forest & Trees was that it was a rapid application development (RAD) product. Once we`d put it in place, building the application was very quick-only two or three weeks," Clements explained.
Since City & Guilds implemented CleverPath Forest & Trees, it has required very little maintenance. "It`s very reliable and we haven`t needed additional support from CA," Clements explained. CleverPath Forest & Trees has helped City & Guilds handle inquiries from customers and the public more professionally. Callers were previously forwarded to a subject expert, as they became available, and the quality of response was dependent upon who took the call, how soon the call was taken and how the issue was resolved.
"Undoubtedly, we now provide a better service to our customers. We`ve added to our sales, too, by being able to refer customers directly to the most appropriate training provider. We can now provide a much more consistent customer interface," Clements said.
Clements adds that in the past, service was patchy and it was hit or miss whether the customer would reach the right person with the right knowledge. "We were going through a great deal of reorganisation when we introduced the response centre, but CleverPath Forest & Trees gave us the support we needed. In fact, the reorganisation wouldn`t have been as successful without a solution like CleverPath Forest & Trees. It has enabled us to provide a much better service to our customers."
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