15 Financial Statements Strategic Report Governance “We want to be at the very forefront of technology development and believe it will provide us with considerable competitive advantage. The increasing size and scale of Franchise Brands means that our technology investment is increasingly spread over a larger business.” Colin Rees Chief Information Officer Quotations system The latest significant roll-out to our franchisees is a new system that allows them to provide a quote to our customers for any further work identified during the initial reactive job. As there is a direct correlation between the speed of submission of a quote and the conversion rate, this should significantly increase our sales. Previously, most quotes for further works were prepared and submitted by a team in the Support Centre based on information supplied by the franchisee. This was an inefficient, manual process which took as long as 10 to 12 days. The new system, launched in early 2019, allows franchisees to submit the quote directly to the customer using professionally-designed, prepopulated templates. We are achieving an 80% improvement in the speed of submission of a quote and are already seeing the benefit in conversion rates. Contact centre solution and technology The investment we have made in a state-of-the-art, cloud-based telephone system for Metro Rod's customer contact centre has resulted in significantly better data and reporting. The Interactive Voice Response technology has resulted in over 30% fewer calls to the Support Centre as these are now routed directly to the franchisee. The customer experience is thereby improved by allowing them to speak directly to our franchisees and receive updates on their jobs. WMS The priority for 2019 is the commencement of the roll-out of our new WMS for Metro Rod. Our vision for this system is that it will allow us to acquire a job, deploy it to the engineer, process the invoice and update our customers in real time, with minimal manual intervention. We carry out approximately 4,000 jobs per week, with an average order value of £200 to £250. Each of these jobs needs to be individually reported on and invoiced. The new WMS will help us keep our customers better updated on the status of each job and improve the accuracy of invoicing. The franchisees will benefit from a faster, simpler and more intuitive system that will additionally allow them to schedule labour more effectively. In due course they will also be able to track their engineers in real time and provide even more accurate ETAs for customers, thereby improving our SLA compliance. The new system will also provide the Support Centre with a higher level of visibility, and hence control, over franchisee efficiency and available capacity. CRM The CRM that is being rolled out in early 2019 will be populated with customer data as well as sales opportunities. We utilise the concept of a “hot-spot” map whereby we map where we are doing work across the UK and where we are not. The “not-spots” represent the sales opportunities and the CRM will help our franchisees target and track these. The CRM will be linked to the WMS once the latter has been fully rolled out, allowing the seamless transfer of data on new customers. Group-wide applications for technology investment While our investment in technology is currently centered on Metro Rod, the systems and functionality we are developing have applications across the Group. Our vision is to have a standard core operating platform (to include email, office applications, support, and key systems such as finance and telephony), together with applications such as the WMS, CRM and performance dashboards, which can be customised for each brand. Our core design principle is simplicity. We want to be easy to do business with and have systems that are simple to operate for our franchisees, engineers and Support Centre teams.