Customer spotlight: Aon, featuring Forrester

What we find when we land with IT Managers and IT Directors like Brian from Aon is that they are progressive in their view. And by that I mean, they don't have the resources in IT to do all these projects and they're not looking to keep it all within their remit. So what we found with Brian is that he's in a mode of empowering the business, but providing the guardrails.

They had a lot of business process improvement ideas coming from the business managers - I think there was 4 key business managers that we've met in different times over the years - all connected with IT, but all about how these are the business process ideas and if we did this we would improve this experience with this customer.

They didn't want to get into the hard level coding. (..) Back to ROI, they wanted to solve this problem, but what was the cost-effective nature of the delivery. And software development in its traditional fashion was just too expensive.

One of the construction companies wins a large piece of work, and they come on site and they have subcontractors that also work in and then there was a challenge - 'how do I know that that subcontractor is insured to come on site and work on this new building?'

And simply put, that was not that straight-forward - that new contractor would land on site, would check in with a form and security, then it would be a phone call back to the main office, then the main office may give Aon a call and ask for an insurance certificate for this contractor and that was breaking down to the point where people were saying 'Look, your paperwork isn't processed, we don't know whether you're insured, we need to come back tomorrow and we'll have it addressed'.

So it was real time impacting Aon's customers - having challenges because of the communications bottleneck back and forth, from the site up to the head office back of Aon - too many layers of communications.

Tech is 25% of the solution. It's also the emotional journey, the impact it has, it's retaining customers, it's winning new customers.

There's two sides - there's definitely operational efficiency, internally. But it's all around the customer experience, So it's enhancing customer experience, but achieving operational efficiency. So if you can get that double win - it's golden.

Essar Oil - external piece around suppliers, the solution is quite neat, how they approached it. We've trained 12 of their staff as well. Working on internal processes, organizational specific processes, but the customer experience process that's resonated the most is around connecting with their suppliers.

So if you want to become a supplier of Essar, you have to sign up in the online portal, go through FlowForma, then get approved. And then, let's say there's different categories of suppliers and it's Request for Quotation (RFQ) sent to 10 suppliers relative to this specific piece they want to quote.

They've given a specific GUID to each of the suppliers, they click on the link, they respond to the quote, they include the attachments and push a button and it goes back in to the internal FlowForma system. Again, very quick, very strong time to value. Solves the big problem - improve operational efficiency as well as improving the experience with their suppliers, and getting their best price.

That's the biggest lesson, if you look thorough just one lens - that's not enough. You've got to see whats going on internally that has an indirect impact back out to your customers, and be wide with your lens.