3d animation still for Kerv 3d animation still for Kerv

Case Study

Children 1st: Delivering better outcomes for families

Company

Children 1st

Industry

Nonprofit

Project Type

Microsoft Dynamics 365

Overview

Children 1st’s ambition is for every child in Scotland to be safe, loved and well, together with their family.

The charity offers emotional, practical, and financial support to help families to put children first and campaign to uphold the rights of every child.

 

Children 1st support the whole family when they need it, for as long as they need it. They offer help to prevent families reaching crisis point, to keep children safe and to support children and families to recover from trauma and harm.

Challenge

Before engaging Kerv Digital, Children 1st were using a proprietary, heavily customised end of life SQL Database to run their organization and deliver critical services to families Technical restrictions and high overheads for modifying the system meant the technology had not kept pace with the changing needs of the charity, or their ways of working.

Not only did Children 1st struggle to update the system to improve processes, the terminology and language used by the system felt out of date and not representative of the ‘human’ side of what they do. The system did not talk about families and children as individuals, and instead referred to them as more transactional service users. This was not representative of the values and approach of Children 1st, it had become clear they needed to evolve all areas of how they recorded important information about families.

The charity wanted to develop a new approach which supports the incredible work with children and families, respects the rights of those whose data they hold, and enable them to evidence the quality and impact of their work through an intuitive system, that is accessible and simple to use. They agreed that Microsoft Dynamics 365 represented the best platform for the charity, due to the extendable nature of the system, allowing them to tweak and evolve the system, to ensure they never stand still with technology again.

Children 1st performed a thorough review of potential providers and settled on Kerv Digital due to their innovative approach to building long-term solutions in partnership with charities and solving problems together rather than offering a one-size-fits-all product.

3d animation still for Kerv
Solution

Once Kerv were engaged to help, the first part of the process was undertaking a thorough discovery piece of work to plan out what was needed and to ensure collective understanding for what the end result would look like across the development team as well as non-technical stakeholders such as senior leaders at Children 1st and of course the families whose data would be recorded in the system

To ensure the new solution was going to be a success, Children 1st performed first-party user research to ensure that children and families were involved in every stage of the thinking, design, and implementation of how they record the impact of their work and the language used across the system. This meant numerous rounds of iteration to the design, to give the best possible experience for both colleagues and families interacting with the system.

Through this series of in-depth design workshops and an agile, iterative approach to development, we collectively delivered three separate apps that would capture information, produce reports and fulfil the ongoing requirements from a range of services across the organisation. Most importantly, these apps used a common set of terms and language that was simple, easy to understand and made sure families felt like respected individuals, and not a number within a database.

3d animation still for Kerv
Result

The technology has helped transform how Children 1st approach recording information about children and families. It enables them to be much more outcome focused, and in line with the individual-focused approach that colleagues have always delivered. The process now starts with recording what families think will make a difference for them, captures the child and family’s journey as they work with the charity and measures what difference this work has made.

By more effectively gathering their hopes, progress, stories and feedback of children and families, Children 1st are amplifying the voices of children and young people, so that they can learn and evidence what really makes a clear and positive difference for children and families. What’s more, having a system that ‘talks their language’ re-enforces the importance of involving children and families in the creation of their own records. Children and families are able to review and connect with their own story as they have recorded it in partnership with the charity.

We at Kerv are incredibly proud and humbled by the opportunity to work on this project with Children 1st and thank all of the team involved. Delivering a project like this that make a difference to families is hugely rewarding and why many of us choose to work in technology. To have feedback from staff at Children 1st that said:

“I would now be proud to show a family their record’ is great evidence that technology can move from a bottleneck to an enabler of change when designed and implemented correctly.”

3d animation still for Kerv

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3d animation still for Kerv 3d animation still for Kerv

Case Study

Children 1st: Delivering better outcomes for families

Company

Children 1st

Industry

Nonprofit

Project Type

Microsoft Dynamics 365

Download Case Study

Overview

Children 1st’s ambition is for every child in Scotland to be safe, loved and well, together with their family.

The charity offers emotional, practical, and financial support to help families to put children first and campaign to uphold the rights of every child.

 

Children 1st support the whole family when they need it, for as long as they need it. They offer help to prevent families reaching crisis point, to keep children safe and to support children and families to recover from trauma and harm.

Challenge

Before engaging Kerv Digital, Children 1st were using a proprietary, heavily customised end of life SQL Database to run their organization and deliver critical services to families Technical restrictions and high overheads for modifying the system meant the technology had not kept pace with the changing needs of the charity, or their ways of working.

Not only did Children 1st struggle to update the system to improve processes, the terminology and language used by the system felt out of date and not representative of the ‘human’ side of what they do. The system did not talk about families and children as individuals, and instead referred to them as more transactional service users. This was not representative of the values and approach of Children 1st, it had become clear they needed to evolve all areas of how they recorded important information about families.

The charity wanted to develop a new approach which supports the incredible work with children and families, respects the rights of those whose data they hold, and enable them to evidence the quality and impact of their work through an intuitive system, that is accessible and simple to use. They agreed that Microsoft Dynamics 365 represented the best platform for the charity, due to the extendable nature of the system, allowing them to tweak and evolve the system, to ensure they never stand still with technology again.

Children 1st performed a thorough review of potential providers and settled on Kerv Digital due to their innovative approach to building long-term solutions in partnership with charities and solving problems together rather than offering a one-size-fits-all product.

3d animation still for Kerv

Solution

During the initial WAN RFI process, Kerv Connect highlighted the benefits of a next-gen SD-WAN that the Group had not considered in the scope of their WAN transformation project. This expertise and insight lead to Kerv Connect being invited to respond to the Group’s WAN Transformation RFP. Kerv Connect ousted 12 bidders in the extensive RFP process to win the contract for the consolidation, simplification, and standardisation of the WAN and Network Security platform. As part of their response, Kerv Connect recommended a POC for problematic production sites where the power of SD-WAN was able to provide tangible value, improving capacity at one site and application performance at another. Kerv Connect’s strategic partnerships with both Dell and VMware won the customer’s confidence with a consolidated solution that was based on the market-leading VeloCloud SD-WAN solution ably supported by Fortinet for Security and Remote Access. Additionally, Kerv Connect’s proposal included fully resilient connections for all sites, globally, with some sites adopting 4G services where wired connectivity was difficult to provision reliably. Kerv Connect’s solution included design, installation, and a fully managed service to ensure that new technology did not place added operational pressures on an already busy IT team. Demonstrating their wealth of experience and insight, Kerv Connect was able to provide the above-mentioned solution at a price that was significantly less than the proposed MPLS equivalent. This removed the requirement for further investment in WAN capacity and resilience saving the Group approximately £750k over 3 years.

“Kerv Connect has proven to be the trusted advisor who helped us make sense of SD-WAN and how it supports our ambitious ‘one network’ strategy. Of the various responses received on our WAN tender, Kerv Connect stood out with their approach to solution design and their strong team. The proof-of-concept installation has already delivered tangible benefit to ABP Food Group and we are excited to get started on the full SD-WAN rollout with them.”

John Armstrong
Group IT Director of ABP Food Group

Improved capacity and resilience

Visibility

All divisions have read-only access to the SD-WAN management platform which provides granular visibility of all traffic across the WAN. This has provided actionable insight that is already returning benefits within the broader ABP IT teams.

Resilience and Performance

Using multiple connections in active-active format to ensure heightened uptime and availability. Further, benefitting from real-time adjustments in application traffic flows to guarantee application performance.

Security and Segmentation

The ability to use a single SD-WAN platform within which the divisions are virtually segmented from each other, enabling the Group to have “one network” and benefiting from tightly controlled inter-divisional interactions.

Application Prioritisation

Ensuring that critical business applications enjoy priority over standard applications.

Cloud Access

Benefitting from Velocloud’s Cloud Gateway Architecture for optimised and resilient access to applications in the cloud (SaaS and IaaS).

Flexibility

Adding capacity is now as simple as adding it to the “connectivity pool” at any one site.

Want to learn more?

Speak our experts!

Give us a few details and we’ll get right back to you.

"*" indicates required fields

This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.
3d animation still for Kerv 3d animation still for Kerv

Case Study

Children 1st: Delivering better outcomes for families

Company

Children 1st

Industry

Nonprofit

Project Type

Microsoft Dynamics 365

Download Case Study

Overview

Children 1st’s ambition is for every child in Scotland to be safe, loved and well, together with their family.

The charity offers emotional, practical, and financial support to help families to put children first and campaign to uphold the rights of every child.

 

Children 1st support the whole family when they need it, for as long as they need it. They offer help to prevent families reaching crisis point, to keep children safe and to support children and families to recover from trauma and harm.

Challenge

Before engaging Kerv Digital, Children 1st were using a proprietary, heavily customised end of life SQL Database to run their organization and deliver critical services to families Technical restrictions and high overheads for modifying the system meant the technology had not kept pace with the changing needs of the charity, or their ways of working.

Not only did Children 1st struggle to update the system to improve processes, the terminology and language used by the system felt out of date and not representative of the ‘human’ side of what they do. The system did not talk about families and children as individuals, and instead referred to them as more transactional service users. This was not representative of the values and approach of Children 1st, it had become clear they needed to evolve all areas of how they recorded important information about families.

The charity wanted to develop a new approach which supports the incredible work with children and families, respects the rights of those whose data they hold, and enable them to evidence the quality and impact of their work through an intuitive system, that is accessible and simple to use. They agreed that Microsoft Dynamics 365 represented the best platform for the charity, due to the extendable nature of the system, allowing them to tweak and evolve the system, to ensure they never stand still with technology again.

Children 1st performed a thorough review of potential providers and settled on Kerv Digital due to their innovative approach to building long-term solutions in partnership with charities and solving problems together rather than offering a one-size-fits-all product.

3d animation still for Kerv
Solution

Kerv Connect’s experience in understanding the business needs and processes required at the infrastructure layer to achieve PCI compliance had been through working with other customers in the retail sector. In particular Kerv Connect was familiar with the challenges, complexity and cost when network segmentation was introduced into a store environment.

Although network segmentation is not a PCI requirement, it is deemed a mechanism to reduce the scope, cost and difficulty of implementing and maintaining PCI DSS controls. Without network segmentation the entire network would fall in scope of the assessment.

Kerv Connect’s solution to achieve network segmentation and consequently isolate cardholder data was to implement a small firewall with security zones. The stateful firewall that was implemented would filter traffic flows in transparent mode, that is, it would be able to restrict access between defined security zones based on specifically defined policy information without the need to re-address endpoints. The security zones and policy definition was specifically designed to align to the requirements of the PCI DSS standard by de-scoping a large part of the store environment including the wireless infrastructure.

Improved capacity and resilience

Visibility

All divisions have read-only access to the SD-WAN management platform which provides granular visibility of all traffic across the WAN. This has provided actionable insight that is already returning benefits within the broader ABP IT teams.

Resilience and Performance

Using multiple connections in active-active format to ensure heightened uptime and availability. Further, benefitting from real-time adjustments in application traffic flows to guarantee application performance.

Security and Segmentation

The ability to use a single SD-WAN platform within which the divisions are virtually segmented from each other, enabling the Group to have “one network” and benefiting from tightly controlled inter-divisional interactions.

Application Prioritisation

Ensuring that critical business applications enjoy priority over standard applications.

Cloud Access

Benefitting from Velocloud’s Cloud Gateway Architecture for optimised and resilient access to applications in the cloud (SaaS and IaaS).

Flexibility

Adding capacity is now as simple as adding it to the “connectivity pool” at any one site.

Want to learn more?

Speak our experts!

Give us a few details and we’ll get right back to you.

"*" indicates required fields

This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.
3d animation still for Kerv 3d animation still for Kerv

Case Study

Children 1st: Delivering better outcomes for families

Company

Children 1st

Industry

Nonprofit

Project Type

Microsoft Dynamics 365

Download Case Study

Overview

Children 1st’s ambition is for every child in Scotland to be safe, loved and well, together with their family.

The charity offers emotional, practical, and financial support to help families to put children first and campaign to uphold the rights of every child.

 

Children 1st support the whole family when they need it, for as long as they need it. They offer help to prevent families reaching crisis point, to keep children safe and to support children and families to recover from trauma and harm.

Challenge

Before engaging Kerv Digital, Children 1st were using a proprietary, heavily customised end of life SQL Database to run their organization and deliver critical services to families Technical restrictions and high overheads for modifying the system meant the technology had not kept pace with the changing needs of the charity, or their ways of working.

Not only did Children 1st struggle to update the system to improve processes, the terminology and language used by the system felt out of date and not representative of the ‘human’ side of what they do. The system did not talk about families and children as individuals, and instead referred to them as more transactional service users. This was not representative of the values and approach of Children 1st, it had become clear they needed to evolve all areas of how they recorded important information about families.

The charity wanted to develop a new approach which supports the incredible work with children and families, respects the rights of those whose data they hold, and enable them to evidence the quality and impact of their work through an intuitive system, that is accessible and simple to use. They agreed that Microsoft Dynamics 365 represented the best platform for the charity, due to the extendable nature of the system, allowing them to tweak and evolve the system, to ensure they never stand still with technology again.

Children 1st performed a thorough review of potential providers and settled on Kerv Digital due to their innovative approach to building long-term solutions in partnership with charities and solving problems together rather than offering a one-size-fits-all product.

3d animation still for Kerv
Solution

Kerv Connect’s experience in understanding the business needs and processes required at the infrastructure layer to achieve PCI compliance had been through working with other customers in the retail sector. In particular Kerv Connect was familiar with the challenges, complexity and cost when network segmentation was introduced into a store environment.

Although network segmentation is not a PCI requirement, it is deemed a mechanism to reduce the scope, cost and difficulty of implementing and maintaining PCI DSS controls. Without network segmentation the entire network would fall in scope of the assessment.

Kerv Connect’s solution to achieve network segmentation and consequently isolate cardholder data was to implement a small firewall with security zones. The stateful firewall that was implemented would filter traffic flows in transparent mode, that is, it would be able to restrict access between defined security zones based on specifically defined policy information without the need to re-address endpoints. The security zones and policy definition was specifically designed to align to the requirements of the PCI DSS standard by de-scoping a large part of the store environment including the wireless infrastructure.

Improved capacity and resilience

Visibility

All divisions have read-only access to the SD-WAN management platform which provides granular visibility of all traffic across the WAN. This has provided actionable insight that is already returning benefits within the broader ABP IT teams.

Resilience and Performance

Using multiple connections in active-active format to ensure heightened uptime and availability. Further, benefitting from real-time adjustments in application traffic flows to guarantee application performance.

Security and Segmentation

The ability to use a single SD-WAN platform within which the divisions are virtually segmented from each other, enabling the Group to have “one network” and benefiting from tightly controlled inter-divisional interactions.

Application Prioritisation

Ensuring that critical business applications enjoy priority over standard applications.

Cloud Access

Benefitting from Velocloud’s Cloud Gateway Architecture for optimised and resilient access to applications in the cloud (SaaS and IaaS).

Flexibility

Adding capacity is now as simple as adding it to the “connectivity pool” at any one site.

Want to learn more?

Speak our experts!

Give us a few details and we’ll get right back to you.

"*" indicates required fields

This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.
3d animation still for Kerv 3d animation still for Kerv

Case Study

Children 1st: Delivering better outcomes for families

Company

Children 1st

Industry

Nonprofit

Project Type

Microsoft Dynamics 365

Download Case Study

Overview

Children 1st’s ambition is for every child in Scotland to be safe, loved and well, together with their family.

The charity offers emotional, practical, and financial support to help families to put children first and campaign to uphold the rights of every child.

 

Children 1st support the whole family when they need it, for as long as they need it. They offer help to prevent families reaching crisis point, to keep children safe and to support children and families to recover from trauma and harm.

Challenge

Before engaging Kerv Digital, Children 1st were using a proprietary, heavily customised end of life SQL Database to run their organization and deliver critical services to families Technical restrictions and high overheads for modifying the system meant the technology had not kept pace with the changing needs of the charity, or their ways of working.

Not only did Children 1st struggle to update the system to improve processes, the terminology and language used by the system felt out of date and not representative of the ‘human’ side of what they do. The system did not talk about families and children as individuals, and instead referred to them as more transactional service users. This was not representative of the values and approach of Children 1st, it had become clear they needed to evolve all areas of how they recorded important information about families.

The charity wanted to develop a new approach which supports the incredible work with children and families, respects the rights of those whose data they hold, and enable them to evidence the quality and impact of their work through an intuitive system, that is accessible and simple to use. They agreed that Microsoft Dynamics 365 represented the best platform for the charity, due to the extendable nature of the system, allowing them to tweak and evolve the system, to ensure they never stand still with technology again.

Children 1st performed a thorough review of potential providers and settled on Kerv Digital due to their innovative approach to building long-term solutions in partnership with charities and solving problems together rather than offering a one-size-fits-all product.

3d animation still for Kerv
Solution

Kerv Connect was able to provide the team with independent industry advice with regards to competing SD-WAN solutions on the market and help establish use cases for each. The team decided to trial two SD-WAN vendors over a year to establish which one best satisfied their requirements. Due to a large amount of structured and unstructured data being created at each race and sent back to HQ for analysis, it quickly became apparent that WAN optimisation was a critical requirement and therefore Silver Peak the most suitable SD-WAN vendor for this use case.

 

Deploying a Silver Peak solution gave the team the ability to use commodity internet for race day connectivity instead of expensive fixed lease MPLS, while still ensuring application performance when it came to the generation and transport of huge amounts of track-side data. The race teams was then able to decommission their expensive MPLS links and replace them with local internet connections using Silver Peak.

The solution was delivered across SD-WAN appliances with a small onsite footprint, allowing them to be decommissioned and redeployed at new race sites with ease. Further, the solution enabled the use of different pre-existing connections at the various race sites, and provided stability in the wavering underlay parameters around the world.

Improved capacity and resilience

Visibility

All divisions have read-only access to the SD-WAN management platform which provides granular visibility of all traffic across the WAN. This has provided actionable insight that is already returning benefits within the broader ABP IT teams.

Resilience and Performance

Using multiple connections in active-active format to ensure heightened uptime and availability. Further, benefitting from real-time adjustments in application traffic flows to guarantee application performance.

Security and Segmentation

The ability to use a single SD-WAN platform within which the divisions are virtually segmented from each other, enabling the Group to have “one network” and benefiting from tightly controlled inter-divisional interactions.

Application Prioritisation

Ensuring that critical business applications enjoy priority over standard applications.

Cloud Access

Benefitting from Velocloud’s Cloud Gateway Architecture for optimised and resilient access to applications in the cloud (SaaS and IaaS).

Flexibility

Adding capacity is now as simple as adding it to the “connectivity pool” at any one site.

Want to learn more?

Speak our experts!

Give us a few details and we’ll get right back to you.

"*" indicates required fields

This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.
3d animation still for Kerv 3d animation still for Kerv

Case Study

Children 1st: Delivering better outcomes for families

Company

Children 1st

Industry

Nonprofit

Project Type

Microsoft Dynamics 365

Download Case Study

Overview

Children 1st’s ambition is for every child in Scotland to be safe, loved and well, together with their family.

The charity offers emotional, practical, and financial support to help families to put children first and campaign to uphold the rights of every child.

 

Children 1st support the whole family when they need it, for as long as they need it. They offer help to prevent families reaching crisis point, to keep children safe and to support children and families to recover from trauma and harm.

Challenge

Before engaging Kerv Digital, Children 1st were using a proprietary, heavily customised end of life SQL Database to run their organization and deliver critical services to families Technical restrictions and high overheads for modifying the system meant the technology had not kept pace with the changing needs of the charity, or their ways of working.

Not only did Children 1st struggle to update the system to improve processes, the terminology and language used by the system felt out of date and not representative of the ‘human’ side of what they do. The system did not talk about families and children as individuals, and instead referred to them as more transactional service users. This was not representative of the values and approach of Children 1st, it had become clear they needed to evolve all areas of how they recorded important information about families.

The charity wanted to develop a new approach which supports the incredible work with children and families, respects the rights of those whose data they hold, and enable them to evidence the quality and impact of their work through an intuitive system, that is accessible and simple to use. They agreed that Microsoft Dynamics 365 represented the best platform for the charity, due to the extendable nature of the system, allowing them to tweak and evolve the system, to ensure they never stand still with technology again.

Children 1st performed a thorough review of potential providers and settled on Kerv Digital due to their innovative approach to building long-term solutions in partnership with charities and solving problems together rather than offering a one-size-fits-all product.

3d animation still for Kerv

Solution

During the initial WAN RFI process, Kerv Connect highlighted the benefits of a next-gen SD-WAN that the Group had not considered in the scope of their WAN transformation project. This expertise and insight lead to Kerv Connect being invited to respond to the Group’s WAN Transformation RFP. Kerv Connect ousted 12 bidders in the extensive RFP process to win the contract for the consolidation, simplification, and standardisation of the WAN and Network Security platform. As part of their response, Kerv Connect recommended a POC for problematic production sites where the power of SD-WAN was able to provide tangible value, improving capacity at one site and application performance at another. Kerv Connect’s strategic partnerships with both Dell and VMware won the customer’s confidence with a consolidated solution that was based on the market-leading VeloCloud SD-WAN solution ably supported by Fortinet for Security and Remote Access. Additionally, Kerv Connect’s proposal included fully resilient connections for all sites, globally, with some sites adopting 4G services where wired connectivity was difficult to provision reliably. Kerv Connect’s solution included design, installation, and a fully managed service to ensure that new technology did not place added operational pressures on an already busy IT team. Demonstrating their wealth of experience and insight, Kerv Connect was able to provide the above-mentioned solution at a price that was significantly less than the proposed MPLS equivalent. This removed the requirement for further investment in WAN capacity and resilience saving the Group approximately £750k over 3 years.

“Kerv Connect has proven to be the trusted advisor who helped us make sense of SD-WAN and how it supports our ambitious ‘one network’ strategy. Of the various responses received on our WAN tender, Kerv Connect stood out with their approach to solution design and their strong team. The proof-of-concept installation has already delivered tangible benefit to ABP Food Group and we are excited to get started on the full SD-WAN rollout with them.”

John Armstrong
Group IT Director of ABP Food Group

Improved capacity and resilience

Visibility

All divisions have read-only access to the SD-WAN management platform which provides granular visibility of all traffic across the WAN. This has provided actionable insight that is already returning benefits within the broader ABP IT teams.

Resilience and Performance

Using multiple connections in active-active format to ensure heightened uptime and availability. Further, benefitting from real-time adjustments in application traffic flows to guarantee application performance.

Security and Segmentation

The ability to use a single SD-WAN platform within which the divisions are virtually segmented from each other, enabling the Group to have “one network” and benefiting from tightly controlled inter-divisional interactions.

Application Prioritisation

Ensuring that critical business applications enjoy priority over standard applications.

Cloud Access

Benefitting from Velocloud’s Cloud Gateway Architecture for optimised and resilient access to applications in the cloud (SaaS and IaaS).

Flexibility

Adding capacity is now as simple as adding it to the “connectivity pool” at any one site.

Want to learn more?

Speak our experts!

Give us a few details and we’ll get right back to you.

"*" indicates required fields

This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.
3d animation still for Kerv 3d animation still for Kerv

Case Study

Children 1st: Delivering better outcomes for families

Company

Children 1st

Industry

Nonprofit

Project Type

Microsoft Dynamics 365

Download Case Study

Overview

Children 1st’s ambition is for every child in Scotland to be safe, loved and well, together with their family.

The charity offers emotional, practical, and financial support to help families to put children first and campaign to uphold the rights of every child.

 

Children 1st support the whole family when they need it, for as long as they need it. They offer help to prevent families reaching crisis point, to keep children safe and to support children and families to recover from trauma and harm.

Challenge

Before engaging Kerv Digital, Children 1st were using a proprietary, heavily customised end of life SQL Database to run their organization and deliver critical services to families Technical restrictions and high overheads for modifying the system meant the technology had not kept pace with the changing needs of the charity, or their ways of working.

Not only did Children 1st struggle to update the system to improve processes, the terminology and language used by the system felt out of date and not representative of the ‘human’ side of what they do. The system did not talk about families and children as individuals, and instead referred to them as more transactional service users. This was not representative of the values and approach of Children 1st, it had become clear they needed to evolve all areas of how they recorded important information about families.

The charity wanted to develop a new approach which supports the incredible work with children and families, respects the rights of those whose data they hold, and enable them to evidence the quality and impact of their work through an intuitive system, that is accessible and simple to use. They agreed that Microsoft Dynamics 365 represented the best platform for the charity, due to the extendable nature of the system, allowing them to tweak and evolve the system, to ensure they never stand still with technology again.

Children 1st performed a thorough review of potential providers and settled on Kerv Digital due to their innovative approach to building long-term solutions in partnership with charities and solving problems together rather than offering a one-size-fits-all product.

3d animation still for Kerv

Solution

During the initial WAN RFI process, Kerv Connect highlighted the benefits of a next-gen SD-WAN that the Group had not considered in the scope of their WAN transformation project. This expertise and insight lead to Kerv Connect being invited to respond to the Group’s WAN Transformation RFP. Kerv Connect ousted 12 bidders in the extensive RFP process to win the contract for the consolidation, simplification, and standardisation of the WAN and Network Security platform. As part of their response, Kerv Connect recommended a POC for problematic production sites where the power of SD-WAN was able to provide tangible value, improving capacity at one site and application performance at another. Kerv Connect’s strategic partnerships with both Dell and VMware won the customer’s confidence with a consolidated solution that was based on the market-leading VeloCloud SD-WAN solution ably supported by Fortinet for Security and Remote Access. Additionally, Kerv Connect’s proposal included fully resilient connections for all sites, globally, with some sites adopting 4G services where wired connectivity was difficult to provision reliably. Kerv Connect’s solution included design, installation, and a fully managed service to ensure that new technology did not place added operational pressures on an already busy IT team. Demonstrating their wealth of experience and insight, Kerv Connect was able to provide the above-mentioned solution at a price that was significantly less than the proposed MPLS equivalent. This removed the requirement for further investment in WAN capacity and resilience saving the Group approximately £750k over 3 years.

“Kerv Connect has proven to be the trusted advisor who helped us make sense of SD-WAN and how it supports our ambitious ‘one network’ strategy. Of the various responses received on our WAN tender, Kerv Connect stood out with their approach to solution design and their strong team. The proof-of-concept installation has already delivered tangible benefit to ABP Food Group and we are excited to get started on the full SD-WAN rollout with them.”

John Armstrong
Group IT Director of ABP Food Group

Improved capacity and resilience

Visibility

All divisions have read-only access to the SD-WAN management platform which provides granular visibility of all traffic across the WAN. This has provided actionable insight that is already returning benefits within the broader ABP IT teams.

Resilience and Performance

Using multiple connections in active-active format to ensure heightened uptime and availability. Further, benefitting from real-time adjustments in application traffic flows to guarantee application performance.

Security and Segmentation

The ability to use a single SD-WAN platform within which the divisions are virtually segmented from each other, enabling the Group to have “one network” and benefiting from tightly controlled inter-divisional interactions.

Application Prioritisation

Ensuring that critical business applications enjoy priority over standard applications.

Cloud Access

Benefitting from Velocloud’s Cloud Gateway Architecture for optimised and resilient access to applications in the cloud (SaaS and IaaS).

Flexibility

Adding capacity is now as simple as adding it to the “connectivity pool” at any one site.

Want to learn more?

Speak our experts!

Give us a few details and we’ll get right back to you.

"*" indicates required fields

This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.
3d animation still for Kerv 3d animation still for Kerv

Case Study

CX and Digital Transformation within the Public Sector

Client

Public Sector

Project

CX Transformation

Product

Genesys Cloud CX

Overview

Road users, the economy, and employees benefit as agency reaches cloud destination in record time

Traffic jams, lane closures and resultant vehicle delays make a huge dent in economic activity, stopping businesses putting products on shelves and consumers from spending money.

 

Metrics matter. Incident management and resolution delays are closely watched, with time lost per vehicle per mile as a key measure to monitor costs.

 

For this essential service the client’s contact centre needed to migrate from an expensive and outdated on-prem system to the cloud with the minimum of disruption. Kerv Experience was chosen to implement the solution, read on for more details.

Challenge

The goal was always to prioritise and handle every call with the utmost efficiency. This was made complicated due to a legacy phone system which struggled to filter calls and relied on drivers pressing buttons to navigate IVR options, putting safety at risk too.

As events snowballed, agents could end up fielding calls for issues that were already being resolved, further compounding matters. The on-prem system was also expensive to maintain and unable to effectively support remote working.

It wasn’t uncommon for our agents to get 15-plus calls on the same issue. They also had to deal with general information requests, diverting them from urgent incidents.

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Solution

In concert with Kerv Experience, the agency set about transforming its contact centre. The goal was frictionless customer and employee experience. Success would be defined by improvements to key performance indicators (KPIs) including increased first contact resolution and citizen trust, along with reductions in average handling time and cost per call. Maintaining compliance during and after the migration was another top priority.

Kerv specialists delivered the initial project in just seven weeks. Blending Genesys Cloud CX with Kerv hosted voice services and Amazon Web Services, the solution makes best use of edge servers while simplifying call routing and making best use of agent skills. Unlike before, contact centre staff benefit from call recording and returning-customer information. Handlers have a more holistic reporting view as incidents unfold, for example from roadside cameras. The contact centre solution is also linked to the agency’s Microsoft Dynamics CRM system and eMite wallboards, leveraging previously buried or siloed data.

Thanks to Kerv, our employees are now better supported for home working. All they need is an internet connection and away they go. They also enjoy powerful new integrations and features. As a result, we’ve seen a marked rise in user satisfaction.

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unified comms compliance recording - woman working from home
Result

In providing a solid foundation for the agency to achieve KPI improvements, the Kerv cloud contact centre solution also underpins wider organisational targets. Along with a 90 percent average for customer satisfaction, the agency is better placed to maintain a strong safety record with 97 percent road network availability and 85 percent of all motorway incidents cleared within an hour.

The Kerv solution was easy to extend beyond the contact centre, enabling HR teams and claims handlers to enjoy the same benefits.

Building on that success, the agency rolled out the new cloud platform across its HR function. “We have one central and nine local HR teams,” adds the spokesperson. “Due to busy workloads our helpdesk used to suffer, resulting in high abandonment rates and cases being raised via other channels. Now, service levels are back to where they should be. Employees get served faster and many HR people are happier working from home.”

Similarly, claims handlers now benefit from feature-rich cloud contact centre features. Before, the team operated in isolation with no technical support. So, customers would phone the contract centre, tying up agents who would invariably end up having to transfer the call. Through predefined intelligent routing, those callers are now connected to the right team first time, reducing stray traffic by 50 percent in the process.

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Case Study

CX and Digital Transformation within the Public Sector

Client

Public Sector

Project

CX Transformation

Product

Genesys Cloud CX

Tackling an inflexible, data-dark IVR system

We hear a lot about open architecture and how Genesys Cloud is purpose-built to handle AI and third-party automation solution integration. But how easy is that to do in reality? We asked one of our customers working in a leading county council to share pertinent tales from the coalface.

Overview – from the client
In my county council role, I’ve been working on telephony for many years, providing technical support for a contact centre with thousands of unified communications users. I also helped re-platform our self-service IVR, so I know about automating call flows. However, up to that point, I had no direct experience of building bots using AI and speech recognition technology.

Challenge

For us, the real driver was the need to noticeably improve public services for residents. To do that we needed to escape the role confusion that comes with over-broad IVR menus. Although our system presented customers with only four choices – option one for adult services, option two for child services, option three for highways, and option four for everything else – that inflexible approach was too hit and miss.

Not least because it relied on the customer understanding how the council functioned as an organisation to get themselves to the right place. In fact, wherever you are, not a lot of people have that kind of insight. In addition, the IVR couldn’t capture valuable data such as why citizens were calling or the nature of their requests. So, our general enquiries option had become an impenetrable black hole.

Solution

We had already been using Genesys Cloud CX for around a year. Supported by Kerv Experience specialists, I was actively involved with our contact centre migration.

Setting up an effective call-triage bot
Just like most AI guides recommend, we started small and experimented on calls coming into our 24-hour IT helpdesk, a comparatively safe environment. This was also a known gap as we lacked visibility of out-of-hours calls coming into our IT teams during the night. Within four weeks we’d built our first voice bot with an AI platform using neuro-linguistic programming, which we chose because it was easy to learn, code and maintain.

The time-consuming bit was gathering data around our processes and actions. We kept things simple. The bot asked three questions: the customer’s name, their asset number and why they were making contact. Using speech recognition, the call got routed to the best-placed agent to deal with the specific issue. Very quickly we saw abandoned calls reduce by up to 50 percent.

Since then, we’ve been learning as we go. The trick is to fail fast. For example, we recently launched a self-serve password reset tool for IT users. However, we continued to receive a vast number of calls, so knew something still wasn’t quite right. So, we briefly suspended service, looked at the data, and tweaked the speech-recognition software. Job done.

Future plans

As well as self-service, we quickly discovered bots are great at doing the legwork and gathering valuable data. That’s also informed our plan. We now have several live bots dealing with specific customer journeys and are about to launch another to assist with general customer enquiries.

Yet, in many ways, the exciting part is still to come. In 2023, along with other local councils we’ll merge into a single unitary authority. But, on day one, it’s likely each council will still retain its own contact centre. So, we’re figuring out how to best streamline service and minimise disruption as we consolidate onto to a single inbound number.

That’s another many-to-many AI-powered communications opportunity where bots with speech recognition technology will be able to do the heavy lifting. For instance, helping smooth volume spikes and deflecting calls through self-service. Or identifying customer intent and routing calls to the right agent, right first time, thereby increasing efficiency by reducing transfers, emails, and call backs.

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Case Study

Exposing Hidden Savings

Client

Metropolis International Group

Sector

Publishing

Price negotiation and haggling over tariffs alone is not the most effective route to cost reduction.

Intelligent call analysis can expose far bigger savings. It’s a specialist job, but big savings are still achievable if you can find a service provider with the knowledge and experience required. The proof of this was discovered by Metropoliis International Group when they reviewed their telecoms services. With some of the biggest titles in the industry, Metropolis is a top publisher in the consumer, business and travel sectors. In this aggressivley competitive environment, Metropolis has held a market leading position since 1994, due in good part to an active call centre focused on advertising sales. Heavy usage of outbound calls to both mobile and fixed line prospects knocks a big hole in the IT budget and represents a significant cost to the business as a whole.

I’m surprised at the scale of the savings. I’m even more surprised that I haven’t had to change my network carrier.

Having a novation agreement with BT, Kerv was able to take over management of our voice services and billing. The process was really simple, without any disruption to our telecoms services. Now, in the knowledge that Kerv is monitoring my call records, I can be confident that I’m always getting the best deal.
Richard Hutchinson
Finance Director

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