Houghton Communications (HC) Case Study Pitching to Houghton Comms, not Deloitte Medium sized telecoms and Entertainment

inment Company currently offering broadband and Pay-TV services to RESIDENTAL COMPANIES. (65% of UK market) Broadband offerings only introduced 3 years ago, thus Houghton has a rather small internet consumer market Houghton structured by FUNCTIONS, Sales, Marketing, Accounting, Product Development and Customer Support departments, with IT department supporting. Current broadband subscriptions around 13%, and currently Houghton has approx 2 million customers. (How to expand/add value to this?) Currently has a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) in place but is unable to cope with rising number of customers. (Issue here: HC has expanding customer/product base but their current post subscription service infrastructure are lagging behind, has to be revamped! => Offshoring?)

Problems (1) Lack of synergy/Potential rivalry between Sales and Marketing How can we come up with solutions that link/merge Sales and Marketing. Managers throughout the business complain about the difficulties or occasionally, the impossibility of getting accurate and timely information from the other departments. Sales Director: There cannot be sales personnel appearing unsure about new packages on offer there has to be greater communication between Marketing and Product Development. Sales Director pushes for new initiative whereby new product development, sales strategies and marketing techniques could be discussed and built upon. However, he didnt get enough support. Marketing Director claims that other segments not putting in enough to keep up with their informational efficiencies. Solutions: Software as a Service (SaaS) - Analytics as a way of boosting cooperation, real time informational transparency between departments? (Boosts business for Deloitte Analytics) Sales/marketing operations manual (with search capabilities) + Daily Twittering of ideas + biweekly updates to manuals. (A leaf from Singapores government service, e.g. Financial Manual?) Retreats/Corporate events to boost cooperation, interaction between members of different sectors. (Come up with Key Performance Indicators and goals every year at retreat?) Training for the salesforce? To answer: How long will these strategies you propose to implement, and what are the benefits of your recommendations? (Timelines? Two proposals short term vs long term changes to be made?)

Why Analytics From Firms POV:

Real-time decision making: Instant feedback allows organizations to capitalize on opportunities earlier and in a more targeted fashion. Real-time decision making has come to fruition because of the use of predictive models and real-time analysis of customer conversations that offer a more accurate approach to the customer.

Predictive modeling: Also including predictive text analytics, predictive modeling is able to combine structured and unstructured data in the same model to give a clearer view of customer preferences, existing and future maintenance of corporate assets, and present certain assumptions about future buying patterns. This could potentially solve the problem of mono-directional flow of information through the CRM from marketing to sales and also lead to a centralization of data across the five departments. Why Analytics from Deloittes View Rather than just tapping on Deloittes Management Consultancy expertise, we would also provide you with exclusive and customised IT and offshoring services through our subsidiaries (?), Deloitte Analytics and Deloitte India (Offshoring). It has useful synergies with the new CRM the flexibility in demand through the CRMcan cut costs significantly and a better ability to cope with rapid growth, increase revenues (ARPU) through customer profiling. (Amazon as an example?)

(2) Problems surrounding the cut-over (how to take down old system, move data across and turn the new system on) Quick assessment of the problem: (a) Inconsistent entries data from Callcall, CheepSurf, WM1 (b) Moving 2 million records would take 14 hours, without checking of data. If we want to solve field split problems, combine/split fields that would take 20 seconds per thousand records each. That would lead to a total transfer duration of 14 + 22.2 = 36.2 hours. (c) 5-6% of records to be fixed manually, 2.50 per record, at a turnover time of 1,500 records a day. => Cost: 250,000 + (67-80) DAYS to complete manual fixes. How should HC approach it, and the likely cost, time and business impacts IF the issues you identified were NOT resolved in an adequate manner.

Solutions: DO NOT GO AHEAD WITH MANUAL FIXES time and cost justifications fixing the records could allow for better targeting of customers, but given the dynamic changing viewership/subscribership of TELECOMS, the cost of 2.50 per record is too high according to Cost-Benefit Analysis. Rationale: The 5-6% of manual fixes cost too much and do not provide much gain in terms of recontracting or providing clients with new products better streamlined to their business. Given 13% growth in subscribership per annum, we believe the increasing demand would offset the loss of the 5-6% manual fixes, especially since they are already customers there is inertia to switch to new broadband, pay-TV and so on. DO GO AHEAD WITH: **Coming up with ENTRY-TRACKERS/AUTOCORRECTION TOOLS. The current problem of bad records was cumulative, if we ensure that entries are proper, we would not even need to propose for such solutions. Proposal A: We do transfer records to a new CRM system but NOT the manual fixing. Start transfer end of work day 1, through day 2 and by day 3, firm can restart call centre operations. Proposal B: Since we are FOR the idea of an offshore call centre (Response to Problem 3), we could start the offshore operations and use that as a stop gap measure while we update/fix the current data in UK. Full access to data from offshore call centre still available say from backed up resources, changes made during the fixing of data by the offshore call centre will be logged and then updated AFTER the fixing is complete. The completed and

updated data will then be utilised by the offshore call centre and operations will continue from there. Questions not answered: Costs? Good to draw a Timeline? Any case study examples? ANSWER on the consequences if our data transfer FAILS. (Essentially ok because we are running completely different call operation systems. The duplicating of operations would not cost much anyway since the current existing call centre should be activated should the offshore call centre not function or have glitches.)

(3) Business Processes Outsourcing Pros/Cons. Generally, we are going for the Cost-centre. What else? IT services Accounting/Transactional finance + CRM Technical Support. Details of general impact on project cost and delivery implications Pros: Labour cost arbitrage/Cost efficient potential of expansion plans, to mitigate spiralling result of mainland supply (of services) growing at the same rate (Graphs by Jenny) Cons: Quality management/Delivery Risk/Training Costs/Public Backlash http://www.internationallawoffice.com/newsletters/detail.aspx?g=6d67e8c8-0b33-49ff-93133a9b715796c3 http://www.optimaabr.com/downloads/case-study.pdf http://www.referenceforbusiness.com/encyclopedia/Oli-Per/Outsourcing.html