Even as the end of lockdown approaches, it is clear that hybrid working is here to stay, with organisations utilising remote and office-based working on a flexible basis, in order to combine the advantages of both.
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Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) is rapidly establishing itself as the solution of choice for the next generation of enterprise networks, where optimal control, visibility, and scalability are essential. In the first quarter of 2024 alone, the SASE market experienced a 23% surge, as more and more organisations began taking advantage of its capabilities.
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The past year has challenged the UK's education sector in ways that would previously have been inconceivable, with children learning from home the majority of the time since March.
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With lockdown restrictions finally easing, and the public looking forward to enjoying the different activities they have been deprived of for the past two years, it's certainly an exciting time for the UK's Hospitality & Leisure sector. But as hotels get ready to open their doors again, it is essential that hospitality professionals do not lose sight of the challenges that will be involved.
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With £4.2 billion set aside for the UK's healthcare sector in the 2024 Spring Budget, there are new opportunities for digital transformation initiatives to optimise operational efficiency and enhance patient care across the country, provided they are correctly acted upon.
Ultimately, the goal is to save £3.5 billion over the next five years by making things more efficient, in line with the NHS Long-term Workforce Plan. Simple, right?
Well, yes and no…
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In light of recent geopolitical events, and the increased threat to corporate infrastructure, organisations across the UK must assume that they will be forced to contend with a cyber-attack in the near future and prepare accordingly. Indeed, the NCSC has already set out its own guidance to help organisations bolster their defences, which we strongly advise you to read and implement.
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In the space of just a few short years, Artificial Intelligence (AI) has gone from being a somewhat niche field, to front and centre in the public consciousness. With the rise of ChatGPT and similar platforms, there is much speculation about where this technology is heading, and what its impact will be on our personal and professional lives. Indeed, organisations across numerous sectors are already exploring the different ways it can be utilised to reduce costs, optimise efficiency, and improve service quality.
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There's no doubt that the past two years have challenged the Hospitality & Leisure sectors in ways that would previously have been unimaginable, with social distancing requirements limiting the number of guests who can be hosted and making familiar processes like checking in and out significantly more complex. But, like every sector impacted by the pandemic, these challenges have inspired a new wave on innovation, as IT infrastructure has evolved to support staff and guests alike, ensuring safety does not have to come at the expense of an enjoyable stay.
Let's consider some of the ways the challenges of COVID-19 have impacted the Hospitality & Leisure sector, and how the lessons learned can - in the long term - open up new opportunities to deliver truly unforgettable experiences for every guest…
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The Challenge
The customer embarked on a strategic digital transformation by migrating critical business systems from fragmented on-premises infrastructure to Microsoft Azure. This transition would not only modernise their IT operations across five European countries but also deliver significant financial savings and operational efficiencies through smart licensing and resource planning.
Throughout the transformation process, the customer faced challenges with maintaining disparate legacy systems across multiple locations, which led to inefficiencies, high operational costs, and limited scalability. They needed a unified, secure, and scalable Cloud platform to support business growth and enable remote working capabilities.
The Solution
The customer engaged Exponential-e to deliver a phased Azure migration strategy, including:
- Professional Services for planning, governance, and execution
- Managed Services for ongoing support and optimization
- CSP services for Azure resource billing
The migration was executed in stages across five European and UK locations, using a combination of rehosting and rebuilding application servers. Microsoft technologies such as Azure Migrate, Azure Backup, Azure Site Recovery, and Azure Virtual Desktop were key enablers.
The project was delivered collaboratively between the customer's internal IT team and Exponential-e's consultants, ensuring alignment with business goals and knowledge transfer. The approach followed Microsoft's Cloud Adoption Framework, ensuring best practices in governance, security, and operational readiness. The successful implementation positioned the customer for future innovation and growth on a modern Cloud foundation.
Solution Benefits
- Migration of 38 Virtual Machines to Azure.
- Implementation of 2 x 100TB GRS Reserved Backup Instances.
- Licensing of 48 x SQL Server Standard (two Core Packs).
- Licensing of 22 x Windows Server 2022 Datacentre (eight Core Packs).
- Overall savings of £100,000 on Azure spend through strategic use of Microsoft Savings Plans and Reserved Instances.
- Improved governance, scalability, and remote working capabilities.
- Consolidation of infrastructure across five countries into a single Cloud platform .
Azure Stack HCI
The Good, The Bad & The Hybrid
In this exclusive whitepaper from Exponential-e's Cloud transformation specialist, James Pearce, discover how the next generation of hyperconverged infrastructure is transforming the way organisations design, deploy, and manage cutting-edge IT infrastructure, along with a proven roadmap for its successful implementation.
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The Customer
The customer is a central governing body that utilises the growing volumes of data generated across multiple channels to optimise the delivery of critical services across the UK, while ensuring the highest standards of security and compliance are maintained at all times.
The Challenge
In 2019, with their existing contact centre solution reaching the end of its life, the customer made the decision to seek out a new platform that would better suit their ongoing drive for the more efficient, effective delivery of critical services, particularly the growing demand for secure, scalable omnichannel communication. Beyond simply routing phone calls, the desired solution would deliver deeper insights into every stage of the customer journey, from the first point of contact to the eventual resolution - and utilise these metrics to consistently maintain a responsive and flexible service delivery that would support the best possible outcomes.
Key considerations included:
- A resilient, scalable multichannel environment - encompassing voice, email, SMS, webchat, and all major social media platforms, that would maximise opportunities for engagement with citizens.
- The ability to configure all elements of the interface to staff's requirements, making it as efficient and user-friendly as possible, with clearly defined supervisory levels.
- Robust cyber security and governance inherent in the design, ensuring data protection policies would be consistently applied and all compliance obligations met, while optimising the accessibility, quality, and utility of all data.
- Granular and broad visibility across the entire solution, allowing administrators to tailor the solution within predetermined parameters, allowing tools and processes to be continually refined in response to feedback.
- Bespoke dashboards and reporting, allowing analysts to effortlessly access key metrics and monitor every step of the citizen journey in real-time.
- Seamless integration with existing platforms, with scope to integrate further tools in the future.
Based on these criteria, an in-depth evaluation was conducted of eleven separate contact centre solutions, measuring their capabilities against a detailed list of requirements and the customer's long-term tech and data strategy. At the end of the assessment process, Exponential-e's deep experience across the public sector, consultative approach, and openness to developing bespoke solutions made them a clear standout, with their Contact Centre as-a-Service solution fulfilling all technical requirements. As a result, they were selected as the customer's technology partner for the new contact centre's design and implementation.
Key factors in this decision included the Cloud-based model, which aligned with the customer's ongoing Cloud transformation journey, the inherent flexibility the platform offered in terms of hybrid working, the ability to integrate existing apps, and its highly intuitive user interface.
Solution
In the run up to 'go live', the Exponential-e's project team worked closely with the customer's own teams to ensure agents were ready to adopt the new technology. Following extensive training, agents were able to make full use of the new platform on the same morning the legacy telephony system was switched off, without any disruption to live services. The already strong relationship between teams at both companies, established during previous complex deployments, proved invaluable here, with close communication and collaboration at every stage laying the foundation for the project's eventual success.
As all interactions were now taking place through a single, fully integrated platform, the consistent application of skills-based routing ensured citizens were put in touch with the appropriate agent as quickly as possible, with time on hold kept to the absolute minimum. In addition to optimising the path to successful resolutions, this also meant that analysts could access all data about each citizen's journey through a centralised knowledge base, regardless of the number of channels involved. A combination of real-time analytics and automated satisfaction surveys was utilised to measure the quality of each interaction.
To ensure this data could be used to its fullest potential, the customer was able to create bespoke dashboards for a range of metrics, including the channels and menus enquiries were received through, wait times, the agent who handled each, whether the call needed to be transferred, and the final time to resolution - all updated every fifteen seconds. This way, both analysts and supervisors could access a wealth of information on both agent performance and citizens' overall experiences, without needing to consolidate information from multiple channels and records, as had previously been the case.
With this critical information automatically collated in an actionable form and the ability to automatically apply service changes through the dashboards, the new contact centre enabled true data-driven decision making at all levels, so tools and processes could be constantly refined and, ultimately, the highest levels of service quality and availability maintained.
As an early adopter of hybrid working, the new contact centre only strengthened the customer's capabilities in this regard, granting supervisors maximum flexibility in terms of how agents were deployed, without compromising data security, call quality, or their ability to collaborate with their colleagues whenever necessary.
The new contact centre is constantly evolving, as the high volumes of data gathered during each interaction reveals new opportunities for service enhancements. Administrators can continue refining their tools and processes via their dashboards, with support available from their Exponential-e account team and a 24 / 7, UK-based support desk, whenever it is required.
All of this demonstrates how the ever-growing volumes of data generated across multiple channels can be used to improve wellbeing across the UK, and the potentially transformative power of technology when utilised in service of the public good.
Solution benefits
- A flexible, omnichannel solution for all citizen communications, optimising the delivery of critical services across the UK.
- A holistic view of every citizen journey through intelligent, real-time analytics.
- Automated tracking of agent performance, helping drive a culture of constant improvement.
- Fully tailored for hybrid working, ensuring consistent security and service quality wherever agents are connecting from.
- Full compliance with all applicable regulations around the handling of citizens' data, while ensuring it remains readily accessible to authorised individuals.
This brochure offers an in-depth exploration of Exponential-e's entire UC and CC ecosystems, all of which we deliver in bespoke combinations to optimise your internal and external communication strategies.
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On Monday 13th October, Vodafone customers experienced a blackout of internet and mobile services, with more than 130,000 reports flagged to web outage monitors. In many cases, business users reported they had been left unable to trade, or even communicate with colleagues or customers, throughout the outage, leading to a demonstrable loss of profits. This included other telecoms providers utilising Vodafone's network, who were similarly affected.
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The finance sector is required to have one of the most sophisticated cyber security postures in the world, with bureaus, banks, finance companies and insurers working closely with their technology partners to ensure sensitive financial data is managed, stored and transferred, with a stringent range of international security standards that must be adhered to at all times. However, cyber criminals have demonstrated repeatedly that they are constantly working to breach even the most sophisticated security ecosystems, devising new ways to exploit both technological vulnerabilities and human error.
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Over the course of the past year, the contact centre has been changed forever, with social distancing requirements meaning that familiar methods of face-to-face contact are now unavailable. In light of these shifts, social media, video and email contact are now regularly utilised as the primary channels for customer queries – a trend that we have seen on the rise for some years now. Between March and November 2020, we saw a significant update in the use of online channels, with 54% of organisations reporting an increase in email contact, 52% reporting an increase in social media, and 65% reporting an increase in the use of web chat.
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Passwords are often more associated with individual and consumer cyber security, but they are an essential part of an organisation's overall security posture. For example, you wouldn't leave the windows open overnight as this would allow easy access into the building for thieves. In the same way, a weak password offers cyber attackers easy access to your corporate infrastructure, after which they can use these credentials to escalate permissions until they granted themselves administration privileges, at which point the risk of financial and reputational damage becomes truly serious!
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Selecting the right storage architecture is essential for organisations that are leveraging Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML), Big Data and IoT analytics. For example, AI applications that involve scientific and medical research create and interact with numerous large files, and therefore need a storage system that can scale to a petabyte level, with zero restrictions. Similarly, ML applications and Big Data projects require a scalable, cost-effective storage solution to accommodate the high volumes of data that will be produced. This raises the question of which storage solution enterprises should use to underpin their overall analytics strategies.
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With the Tech industry celebrating International Women in Engineering last week, a new study of women in tech has found that:
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Failure Demand: "Demand caused by failure to do something or do something right for the customer"
Seddon, 2003
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"Not-for-profit organisations have provided a trusted and valued source of independent advice for people throughout England for many years. They are a vital part of our national support infrastructure and somewhere to turn to in times of crisis."
Nick Hurd, MP
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Here's why that's a good thing…
"In the new contact centre, we're no longer reliant on hunt groups, and can onboard new services and new desks very easily, which has allowed for a much higher level of agility in terms of how we connect and collaborate with our colleagues and partners. We've also got a much higher level of control, so we don't need to go through our IT teams to make changes or updates when we need to, and can constantly refine our call flows."
Stacey Whyte, NHS Digital
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The past year of upheaval in the digital landscape has created a number of singular challenges for the Legal sector, in addition to firms' longstanding obligations around security and data governance.
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