Orange Genie: More wins for contractors, recruitment agencies and end clients

Date: December 03, 2009

Orange Genie has a fundamental commitment to the continuous improvement of its customer service. Over the past 3 years we have undertaken a review of what we do and how we do it. A key element of this process has been surveying and talking to our contractors (including some that didn’t join us), the recruitment agencies we work with and the end clients who host our contractors.

It is fair to say that we have an extremely lengthy list of requirements. We developed 4 categories for the requirements of ‘essential’, ‘nice to have’, ‘aspiration’ and a final group of ‘landed from another planet’. Although we constantly update our feedback, add and revise the list we have continuously invested in the improvements required.  It is clear that we will never get to the end of the list because technology, legislation and business practices continually change.

Some of our early wins have included:

• A move from using some 12 separate databases 4/5 years ago to a single Microsoft SQL Server database. This one step meant that we all used the same information, and could really focus on the quality of the data.
• A move from an essentially manual processing system with a few disparate software programmes, to an environment where all systems work from the same SQL Server database. This reduced the need for us to re-key information, eliminated errors, and speeded up our processing times.
• Having moved to the single database we embarked on the development of a contractor portal providing both the contractor and staff a ‘single customer view’ of processing information and contractor history.  We are now up to version 23, with our next iteration due out this month.   
• The development of an agency portal allowing agencies to interact with us automatically, and providing a single customer view of their contractors. Once again this has lead to a reduction in errors and speeded up our processes.
• The stabilisation of our workforce and a substantial investment in their training and development. This has led to some huge wins in terms of customer services. Our staff are now better able to answer queries quickly and accurately which has led to a huge leap in our customer satisfaction rate, significantly quicker call & email answering times, and fewer errors.  The contractor services team now spend much of their time being pro-active and this has significantly reduced the number of contractor calls and queries.  

In the past few months we have seen further progress to underpin our commitment to continually improving customer service.  

• We gained UKAS accreditation to ISO 9001:2008 standards for our quality management systems.  While this doesn’t guarantee great service, we have allowed an independent external body to undertake a rigorous audit of our systems and they have confirmed that we comply with the standard. The results of accreditation include:
• Well defined and documented procedures improve the consistency of output
• Quality is constantly measured
• Procedures ensure corrective action is taken whenever defects occur
• Defect rates decrease
• Defects are caught earlier and are corrected at a lower cost
• Defining procedures identifies current practices that are obsolete or inefficient
• Documented procedures are easier for new employees to follow.

The ongoing benefits will be:

• Consistent, repeatable processes and a common system
• Fewer problems with failures in service quality
• Staff know what to do and how you want it done
• Rapid identification if things go wrong, and where; remove repeating or wasting time on the same old problems
• Many problems will disappear because you know how to prevent them; if they do come up, you'll know how to fix them faster
• Better management control and reporting

• We have introduced (an award winning!) Health and Safety system that has addressed a number of critical problems being faced in the use of freelance contractors. As you will all know we provide online health and safety training and risk awareness to all our contractors.  This initiative had 2 purposes:
• The directors of OrangeGenie have a legal responsibility to provide Health, Safety and Risk awareness training to its employees. The training was brought in to meet our responsibilities.
• From end client feedback we understood that there was a demand to ensure that contractors had a generic knowledge of health and safety in order to save them time and money. We felt that introducing this initiative would offer our contractors some competitive advantage in the marketplace when they are seeking new assignments.

As we have developed this initiative it became apparent that Recruitment Agencies had responsibilities under the Employment Agencies Act to only place contractors with clients where they will be working in a safe and healthy environment.  Several end clients had no health and safety policy and some assumed that training would have been undertaken and where unaware of their responsibilities in law.

We were, of course, delighted to be short listed by the Association of Professional Staffing Companies for their Innovation of the Year award for our work. In announcing OrangeGenie as the winner the judges said “In the increasingly regulated business environment, this year’s winner provided the recruitment sector, its candidates and customers with a simple, yet thorough and highly practical solution to a critically important issue.”