African Unity Case Study

African Unity Group is an investment company with a primary focus on investing in profitable businesses that operate in the financial services industry.

Statistics.

At African Unity, we are progressive in our thinking, yet calculated in the management of our clients. We believe in offering Financial Advisors and clients products that are agile, easy to understand and valuable in every sense of the word.

What problem is the customer facing?

African Unity deal with numerous processes in their organisation based around insurance needs. The processes involve administration of processes requested by clients. African Unity were dealing with this process through email, as such tickets were logged as an email received. Due to the nature of the business African Unity had a number of SLA’s that they needed to achieve in terms of response time and ticket completion for their Administration workdesk. AU were unable to:

1. Track tickets through the process and understand what status a ticket sat in.
2. Understand ticket allocation per staff member
3. Understand metrics around meeting the SLAs
4. When allocating ticket they had no indication of where the ticket was logged and for whom
5. AU were unable to allocate subtasks and assign them to individuals

What have they done to resolve the issue ?

The team attempted to solve the solution through mailboxes for specific processes, however they found the mailboxes got cluttered and became impossible to track where in the process they were with any given task.

What other products/services where they currently using?

Exchange

How did they find GTconsult?

African Unity heard about Gtconsult through word of mouth in the insurance industry

Why did they go with GTconsult Services/Solution?

Enabled By GTconsult

In collaboration with GTconsult, African Unity decided to leverage the power of the GTconsult Workbenches, on Office 365. The solution was an amalgamation of SharePoint Online for management of data and presentations of the queues, a custom Javascript HTML5 framework underpinned by jQuery and REST API to generate a highly responsive, performance oriented application that worked on both desktop and mobile and benefiting from Gtconsult’s approach to deliver data with as few screen refreshes as possible through AJAX and the Rest API. The email component was managed through ThinkAutomation that brought back the ability to “Email to a list” in SharePoint as well as provide automated feedback to clients via mail, ticket routing and document upload.

Office 365 Intranet

The first port of call for change management reasons was to design an intranet landing on SharePoint Online. African Unity were new to Office 365 and had not wokred on SharePoint before, as such the landing page provided a needed introduction to the technology. The policy administration workbench solutions was built to manage tickets requests. The solution exposed the following functionality:

Policy administration workbench

1. Responsive Application Framework using jQuery, RestAPI and a number of jQuery plugins
2. Security driven navigation and functions for different roles in the process
3. The ability to capture tickets into the workbenches either manually or via email.
4. Rights for a router to assign tickets.
5. Client notifications of process, ticket numbers and status changes
6. Track ticket and user history
7. Assign SLA based on ticket types
8. Auto assign and manually assign sub tasks for tickets
9. Specially categorised subtask types
10. One to many relationship between tickets and tasks
11. Track and push notifications for internal feedback, ticket allocation and client feedback
12. Status tracking and SLA tracking
13. Search for tickets
14. Matching Similar and Related tickets
15. Upload documentation against a client
16. Archiving of data
17. Processes to track information awaiting and to remind agents of information on given dates
18. Bulk Assign tickets and tasks to users
19. Provide real-time drill down reports for managers to monitor SLA, task allocation, Age analysis and user metrics
20. TV dashboards for teams to self-monitor metrics

Timeline:

3 weeks initial implementation

Team Used:

JavaScript Devs, Sharepoint Gurus and ThinkAutomation Dev

Issues Faced:

Field level security for tickets dependant on rights of signed in user. Caching of data and refreshes – With the minimal download strategy of SharePoint and Office 365 we found roll out of version to be problematic due to historic libraries being cached. This was mostly prevalent in Chrome which was the main browser used by the client

Return On Investment (ROI).

Thoughts on GT

“GTconsult is solution driven and get the job done.” – Maretha Spies, CRO

GTconsult Team Quotes

“African Unity likes to provide us with challenges, and we enjoy that. The team require systems to grow to the next level and achieve their requirements, yet always pushed the GTconsult team to keep pushing for enhancements and try new techniques. The toolsets used allowed for rapid development with GTconsult’s strong JS and REST API knowledge resulted in a product we are proud to label as ours, responsive, performance oriented and easy to use all built on Office 365.”

– Craig Tarr | Chief Operating Officer

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