In January 2021 Calero announced our innovative Centers of Excellence service approach, an initiative built to deliver practice area thought leadership and establish the appropriate governance and processes to deliver best-in-class service for all clients.
Our primary strategy for constantly creating excellence is to promote, in every way we can, the proactive sharing of best practices among the nearly 1,000 professionals on our team.
Many organizations find such sharing to be difficult to begin, and even more difficult to sustain. As a result, they end up having each department function in its own silo with its own standards, practices, processes and procedures, the quality of which may be vastly uneven.
Our Centers of Excellence (CoE) are each carefully aligned to a primary function of our organization. They are:
· Customer Value which maximizes the customer experience from end-to-end, from sales cycle through ongoing business cycles
· Invoice Lifecycle focuses on providing the most efficient, productive, and high-quality methodologies for acquiring , processing, and paying customers technology-related invoices
· Inventory works constantly on improving the ways in which we gather initial inventory information from customers for all contracts, services, and equipment across their technology estate and then constantly maintain its accuracy
· Audits enables the tremendous savings we provide to our customers by ensuring they have the most optimized technology estate with the least amount of spend
· Provisioning increases the value to our customers by ensuring wireline and wireless service orders are efficient, rapid, and accurate every time
· Mobility concentrates on the growing adoption of a multitude of different devices, services, and needs, fueled in part by the work-from-home evolution that occurred as a result of COVID-19
· Implementation aims to deliver value to a customer as quickly as is plausible, and removes the traditional barriers of transition
Each Calero business unit performs many, if not all, of these functions regularly. The goal of each CoE is to formalize our processes and institutional knowledge so it may be shared with others. In this way when one of these teams learns or develops something new, they will quickly share it with the others to everyone’s benefit.
Each Center of Excellence has its own carefully developed, and agreed upon, charter. All charters focus on the people, processes, and technologies we employ to serve and satisfy customers.
Setting your people up to be successful is critical and begins when a new employee is onboarded to the company. It then progresses through continuous training on a path designed to allow each person to achieve clearly defined individual goals that are carefully aligned with company goals.
The scope of each Center of Excellence is defined by its processes. It is critical to everyone’s success to thoroughly define the standard operating procedures and provide clear, understandable, achievable, meaningful metrics to constantly gauge our success. What doesn’t get inspected doesn’t get respected. This includes a defined forecast for the return the company can expect on each of our investments.
Calero distinguishes and differentiates from competition through our extensive use of sophisticated technologies to accelerate services while increasing accuracy and quality. Part of our technology design ethic is the inclusion of what we refer to as “system guardrails.” Fundamentally, these assure that anything we have not automated, that must involve people, carefully drives those people through their tasks. All functions are “system driven,” which assures that all employees take the best possible action to always move tasks forward.
Ultimately, all of this is designed to deliver real value and the ultimate customer experience to our clients. We recognize that every customer defines “value” differently. For some its cost savings, for others its quality of execution, or delivering an excellent employee experience to their people. Our goal is to deliver on all these definitions of value and more. The results are reflected in our high rate of client retention.
Each of these CoE’s meets regularly so they can share observations, learnings, new processes, and procedures, and more. In the final analysis, achieving excellence is simply not enough. Methodically improving quality across the entire enterprise is the goal!
Look for Part 2 of our Service Centers of Excellence series, coming this summer, where we will highlight individual centers and their impact on service levels for enterprise customers.