Business and management consultancy services

Tender description

Yorkshire Water Services Limited (‘YWS’) is one of the largest Water Utility companies in the UK, with a turnover of GBP 1 billion. YWS provides water and wastewater services to 5.2 million customers. YWS are due to start their new ‘Asset Management Period’ (‘AMP’) and see a culture of sustainable improvement as key to delivering their ambition to continue to provide excellent service whilst keeping bills affordable. YWS are tendering the services that will provide, consultancy/advisory services regarding the development of an internal culture that embraces journey management and continuous improvement. Lot 1: End to end journey management will require support across the following areas both in a consulting capacity and contracting alongside the core team. Collaborative approach centred around growing capability, supporting and informing the Yorkshire Water approach to enable best-in-class customer experience in an increasingly efficient way for the business. 1) Understanding what customers truly value — support in creating an outside-in view of the world by evidencing and synthesising numerous sources of information to create compelling insights to provoke action. Insight — customer opinions (what they say); — customer behaviour (what they do); — FAQs and online search trends (what they search for); — social Media and complaints analysis (what they shout about). Customer feedback — gather and analyse ‘voice of the customer’ measures; — identify pain points and gain points; — benchmark against best in class inside and outside industry; — align customer view across the business. Foresight — understand future customer expectations and opportunities; — challenge the organisation and regulators’ thinking; — inspire stakeholders with what’s possible; — maintain an outside-in view of the industry; — influence organisational strategy. 2) Setting clear direction, mobilisation and engagement — making clear connections between business strategy, change programmes and colleague engagement Strategy creation — define CX ambition and goals in line with the organisational strategy; — define, agree and understand the core customer segments/personas; — prioritise key touch points and experiences to apply a dedicated design focus; — identify the cost of inaction as well as the business case for change. Change Implementation — prioritise initiatives and develop light-touch business case for customer and commercials; — robust engagement and handover process with delivery stakeholders; — engage and inform recruitment, training, and coaching initiatives. Organisation engagement — bring the story to life across the business to engage and inspire; — surface and share good news stories and examples of best practise; — gather improvement ideas; — immerse senior colleagues. 3) End to end journey management and design Support a systematic approach to continuously improving end to end journeys against a clear future ‘target state’ Journey management — assess and evidence the current reality of end to end journeys on an ongoing basis (emotional, mental and physical effort); — track and monitor improvements, measuring success by impact on customer, colleagues and commercials; — support colleagues to think broader than their own area to galvanise a holistic approach; — focus on the whole customer journey not just the business journey including areas outside direct control; — governance. Experience design — design and shape end to end journeys collaborating across all key stakeholders and third-party expertise; — develop a robust design process and experience assessment methodology; — surface ideas from within the business and outside perspectives. There are two main needs from an improvement point of view that we will need external support for: (a) Working as a deliverer • provide expert consultants who can deliver improvement work where the YW COE do not have the capacity to deliver; • this work will tend to be project based with a defined timeframe and scope. Most likely less complex ‘in team’ or ‘in function’ work; • we would expect this work to be undertaken via our methods/approaches and for any partner to be an extension of the internal YW Team. Examples might be: Process modellers, CI analysts, improvement specialists – people who can deliver improvement interventions as well as do task-oriented activity for process ownership, management and governance. (b) Working as a partner to the YW COE • provide expert consultation to work ‘shoulder-to-shoulder’ with the YW COE in delivering their objectives and build capability; • this work could include anything from our portfolio: — the co-delivery of a performance excellence culture within business teams, — improvement project co-delivery (most likely complex, cross functional/business wide), — general advice and coaching to develop our COE, — training co-delivery, — external benchmarking/best practice so that the YW COE can continuously improve their offering. YWS expect this work to be done ‘shoulder-to-shoulder’ with our COE so that a sustainable transfer of skill can take place reducing our reliance on external support for basic improvement delivery.