Change and Transformation in the Private Sector
Capita, an international business process outsourcing and professional services company, provides consulting, digital and software services to help clients streamline their operations and strengthen relationships with their customers. It operates across Europe, India and South Africa, employing 61,000 staff.
With a newly appointed CEO, Chief Growth Officer, first CMO and a global rebrand, Capita was keen to forge ahead with its vision for a new period of growth, aiming to build stronger, data-led customer relationships with valuable cross-selling opportunities. But the legacy of its historical growth was an obstacle: as well as multiple internal divisions and technologies, acquisitions had brought in new people, processes and cultures, making Capita’s operations increasingly complex and less streamlined.
In 2018, Capita was using 34 different CRM systems, spread across seven different divisions. With so many different sources, it could take three weeks to extract and combine the data for group-level reporting. The lack of accurate, real-time information made it difficult to manage sales, inform and monitor investment decisions, or even be aware of what potential cross-selling offerings existed across the business. While marketing was key to Capita’s vision for growth, any hope of having daily sales reviews or responding rapidly to cross-selling opportunities was thwarted by poor-quality information.
Although each division had started to integrate its own systems, the real benefit – and challenge – lay in business-wide consolidation, to give management a ‘single version of the truth.’ Capita’s first attempt, designated ‘Reignite Growth’, began in January 2019 with another partner. This stalled within a few months, due to the complexity of different requirements from multiple divisions, so Capita turned to PwC in July 2019.
Capita asked PwC to migrate the whole business to a single CRM and marketing automation system. It needed an initial live solution by November 2019, then full deployment by May 2020 – the same deadline as its previous integration attempt.
PwC’s solution was built around its BXT (Business, Experience, Technology) approach, which put Capita’s own people, and their knowledge, at the centre of the process from the start, and enabled the speed of innovation the project’s timescale demanded. PwC delivered a prototype in six weeks and a minimum viable product in three and a half months, followed by five further updates alongside rollout to around 1,400 staff across eight groups.
While this was a business transformation centred on technology, PwC made sure the project had people at its heart. They built collaborative teams who could rapidly take risks and innovate, and gamified aspects of development and demonstration – fun, engaging experiences to achieve buy-in and drive adoption. As a result, Capita’s people were ready and eager to work with the new system, and each other, leading to more and better data, improved customer insights, and increased cross-selling opportunities.
Not only did PwC help the client get 1,300 CRM users and 80 marketing automation users onto one system in under a year, but they also drove a culture of openness and collaboration that allowed Capita to realise the true potential and business value of the system. A solid foundation for future growth.
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