Shared Services Excellence Award-winner Interview: Nicola Stokes, Anz

Shared Services Excellence Award-winner Interview: Nicola Stokes, Anz

SSON: How did you become involved with ANZ’s shared services program?

Nicola Stokes: I was appointed General Manager Shared Services in 2005. There was probably about two-thirds of the organization that exists today in place when I got there; the organization was all based in Melbourne at that stage. I think the most striking feature for me when I arrived was probably that the people didn’t really understand why they were all put together in a shared service; each piece was run quite separately, and was very much a cost-driven service-delivery focus.

SSON: What functions are in place now?

NS: Basically as ANZ Shared Services exists now, we are responsible for HR Operations such as recruitment, remuneration, learning and development, pension/superannuation; Finance processes such as payroll, accounts payable, reconciliations, indirect taxes, information and reporting; Strategic Sourcing (IT and business services); and ANZ Environmental sustainability program and system. We’ve expanded quite a lot over the last couple of years. We have a team of 400 now, half in Melbourne, and the other half are in India, in Bangalore with our captive center there. The clients are based in various geographies, Australia, New Zealand, India and SE Asia. The headcount for ANZ is about 35,000, and the 400 of us service all of them.

SSON: That does sound like a major expansion. So was this planned when you came in, or was it as a result of your own strategy formulated after your appointment?

NS: When I went in, you could just see the opportunity; I looked at ANZ’s strategy, where it was going with its five-year plan, and it was definitely based around having a very efficient and effective and high-quality infrastructure to support its planned expansion. ANZ had a captive center in Bangalore for nearly 18 years, and it was used for software development; my boss at the time – Mike Grime, managing director of Operations Technology and Shared Services (OTSS) – understood we had a huge competitive advantage in India and we weren’t using it. So I looked at how we could use the captive for shared services and started to move the transactional elements of our service offering to Bangalore, with great success. We kept the roles that interacted with the client in the same country as the client – a hub and spoke model. I also looked at overall cost, because obviously in all SSOs cost is an important factor, but we had quite a different way of approaching that I think. ANZ’s products are not the cheapest banking products on the market, but they are cost-effective, and so the question was, how could we match the cost-effective nature of shared services to meet that sort of customer delivery.

When I talk about “customers” I mean the customers of the bank; my “clients” are my internal customers, if you like. Sometimes when you use the term “customer” for your internal clients, you create a kind of master-servant relationship within the organization. That doesn’t actually do any good, because in the end what we’re trying to do is all oriented around the end customers, which for us are the retail banking and institutional customers.

My strategy involved using the Heskett model of the service-profit chain, to help my own staff understand why they were all in a shared service: basically if you can deliver an excellent level of internal service, that will enable the front-line staff to deliver a similar level to customers. Indeed Heskett’s model shows how front-line staff can ONLY deliver the level of service they receive on the inside of the organization. So that gave everybody a bit of vision as to how all the pieces fit together given everything we were responsible for was about the internal operations of the Bank. It also helped our clients understand what else we could do for them and what would or would not be effective. It was also important that we did not become the dumping ground for things the rest of the Bank did not want, so if a process/service was customer-facing or revenue-generating it did not belong in Shared Services. Then when we started to demonstrate this strategy/model to our clients, and to articulate our value proposition, that’s when we started to grow and we started to take on more work for them, which was wonderful.

SSON: Does the SSO have any clients beyond ANZ or is it still all internal shared services?

NS: It is still all internal shared services.

SSON: Was there the plan eventually to sell services to other organizations?

NS: It’s a really interesting question. Sourcing and partnerships are one of the strengths of what we developed, but a lot of shared services entities start to fail when they start to take on third-party work, because they’re going against the reason they were set up in the first place. What in my experience you need to do is draw a line in the sand – and then if you decide that now it’s about revenue generation, ANZ then becomes a client. There are many documented cases where this had been attempted and has been a failure as the shared service starts to believe it exists for its own revenue-generation – and the business we are in is banking. If this step is to be taken the most successful ventures I have seen are when the shared services is sold or JV’d.

Part of the vision that we had for shared services was that we would enable the Bank’s growth whether organic growth or through acquisition. Shared services traditionally get involved after the acquisition has been decided, whereas what we believe is that because of the responsibility placed in our shared services organization – we had financial stewardship of Abn– we would become part of the decision-making process about what we would acquire because we would be able to demonstrate that we would enable the benefit delivery of the M&A by getting things up and running and integrated more quickly. So, my strategy was to ensure that shared services would move from a purely cost-focused, internal transaction operation to something that was a crucial part of the growth and development of the Bank through operational excellence and energetic and agile service delivery.

SSON: Before we move on to talking about your role as thought-leader for which you’ve been recognised, can you tell us a little more about the environmental sustainability department you mentioned?

NS: Absolutely. It’s quite unusual within shared services. Part of ANZ’s strategy under the previous CEO was ensuring the bank became more environmentally sustainable; there was quite a big community and employee engagement plan, but the environmental sustainability area, our understanding of our consumption, was still in its infancy. We started with the basics: we designed and implemented an environmental management system, around creating baselines and understanding performance. If you look at the other pieces of shared services – especially the procure-to-pay process and the responsibility for the supply chain, the processes and methodologies we used, we could control the type of things the Bank consumed.

Our next step was to further understand how we could become carbon-neutral. We started working on a strategy and education program, internally for bank employees and all the way through our supply chain. We started to only select environmentally sustainable products for the catalogue; we worked with current suppliers so they could get to a benchmark with us; and we stopped doing business with people – new work – if they didn’t understand their own footprint. We taught our suppliers things and they taught us things.

And I was actually voted onto the United Nations Environment Program Finance Steering Committee, and went to Geneva representing ANZ. I was voted onto the committee by 80 of the banks globally who are members of the UNEP-FI. And our crowning glory was that in the Dow Jones Sustainability Index we, ANZ, became the number-one sustainable bank for 2007/08 – pipping WestPac at the post – which wasn’t the aim! But it was a wonderful outcome, and it’s now embedded in the way that the bank does business. We can now monitor everyone’s buying behaviour on an ongoing basis. It was quite a wonderful achievement: a lot of hard work – and a lot of scepticism – but one of the great examples of shared services being able to demonstrate that its value is much more than transactional or purely operational functions.

SSON: That’s a very impressive achievement. Congratulations.

NS: Thank you. We’re very proud of it.

SSON: You deserve to be. Let’s move on to your award. Why do you think you were honoured as Shared Services Thought Leader of the Year?

NS: Two things I think. Firstly the leadership program I put I place and secondly the strategy, business plan and implementation methodology I designed and used to ensure the ongoing effectiveness of shared services in ANZ.

The leadership program that I put in place was a three-year rolling program for all of the leaders in shared services – so not only the leaders in line management, but my direct reports and their direct reports functionally. And then we added people who hadn’t worked in a bank, because they bring in all this other experience. Shared services is full of young people, so we picked out all the older people with experience in life, and knowledge, so the whole leadership forum could get that sort of balance.

We used a Human Synergistics tool called Life Style Inventory which is very well-known in this part of the world, and it talks about moving from passive-aggressive or defensive-aggressive styles to constructive styles, and their tools show that the constructive styles lead to increased share price and profitability. We ran that over the first year of the program, putting 38 people through this: we launched it for the whole 400 in Melbourne and Bangalore because when people see shift in their leaders they get concerned, they don’t know what’s going on – so we simply articulated what was going on. I employed a leadership coach and for six months the 38 each met with me every eight to twelve weeks and with the coach every four weeks, working through the program – so they sort of practised for six months and then went up to implement for the next six months.

Then Year 2 of the program was positive psychology: this is a way of thinking and discussing what’s good in life, and doing more of it, rather than as most organizations operate – on deficit, grading performances on what you haven’t done or what you’ve done wrong. This research is quite phenomenal. It’s run as a course at Harvard, and it’s the most attended course. [Martin] Seligman did a lot in relation to happiness, and what he’s actually shown is that it’s not about being happy but being happier, and the effects on the physiology of the brain and what that does for individuals and therefore the organization. By rolling this program through, we got the biggest shift to constructive profile that Human Synergistics have ever seen in their history and they’re actually doing a profile on us, that’s out in the next couple of months.

The Heskett service-profit chain model worked really well for us; I’m not sure if it has to be that one in particular, but it has to be something that will bind all the people who work in shared services together. And then we had a robust business-planning methodology which we developed that other parts of the bank started to use, using end-to-end process management approach, and Lean and Six Sigma, Balanced Scorecard and a lot of those basic tools that deliver an effective process but then free up the individuals in the process to think and be innovative for our clients. We automated end-to-end so we could use our ideas and our people to deliver a better service. You know, if our clients have a clunky process that takes their time away from managing existing and new clients – the consequences are quite well documented.

The combination of these two elements ensured that we were moving up the value chain and would continue to do so.

SSON: You mentioned targets there; what were your personal targets? Did you set yourself specific benchmarks you wanted to surpass?

NS: I had a three-year plan for shared services. My targets were around employee engagement; financials; risk; process effectiveness and client/service delivery. This was all wrapped up into an overall measure of how many new products or services were we asked to take on for the Bank. Did my colleagues want to do business with my organization? This combination of qualitative and quantitative data was fundamental for our success and progress towards the achievement of our strategy – and of course to help us stop doing work that was no longer valued by our clients.

SSON: What were the biggest obstacles you encountered?

NS: It’s really interesting question and I feel the longer I think about it the more I come up with, but there are a few key ones. The first one is understanding that most business units want to control their own stuff – not wanting to give anything up. If you think about why that is, in most organizations roles are scoped and scaled and paid relative to the actual size of the job – headcount is important in this equation – so by taking people’s staff we’re actually decreasing their own roles within the organization. So we began taking in pieces of work, saying “just give that to us, we’ll put it through our process and then we’ll give it back to you, and you can just run it” and they thought this was just wonderful. Eight times out of ten they never took it back, because they were still getting the credit or the kudos or whatever – we’re all human beings – for the outcome of the process running really effectively or the engagement running really well. And I think that’s something that people all over the world running any form of shared service continue to challenge. We in shared services need to keep our focus on the benefits to the whole organization, not the benefits for our own SSO. Another challenge is that when you take on other work all of a sudden the expectations change. So somebody that’d been running their own process and had a quality score and a time rating and error rating and complaints rating, when we came into the equation the expectation changed massively and our clients want a much higher quality rating for example. So that’s where we introduced client councils, so we could say “this is what we’re taking over and that’s what it looks like now”. This started as a plan over 12 months but we were able to make traction much more quickly, achieving targets over six to eight months. This approach only works with a lot of face-to-face interaction.

Another major change – maybe not an obstacle – but the transformational change through the leadership from being a reactive organization to being proactive, so not only doing what was asked, when the answer was always yes irrespective of what was possible or not, but actually coming up with thoughts and ideas for our clients because we understood their business just as well as they do.

SSON: Let’s look at the future now. What are your plans? You’ve moved on from ANZ…

NS: Well… I moved from Sydney down to Melbourne to take the role, and had a three-year timeframe in my mind. And that’s what I did. I think I’m where a lot of people get at a certain time in their lives… I got very involved in the environment and community agendas, and I’ve decided that I want to work in more community-focused organizations. What I believe is that the things that I do around consolidating internal activities and organization, reducing costs while keeping service levels high, and enabling access to products and services – I want to do within a more community-oriented organization, rather than in an organization where any monies I was involved in saving or producing go back to the shareholder only.

I’ve got to this stage in my career that I want to do something with a bit more purpose to get me up in the morning! I’ve had a ball, ANZ was wonderful, and I want to do something that takes that commercial acumen that we develop in corporates into working for an organization that’s more community-oriented. It’s a pretty huge step for me. I’ve given myself six months, by the way, to see if they want me – and if not I’ll get back into corporate and will still really enjoy it! But I’m really very excited by trying to make the change.

SSON: Please do let us know how you get on!

NS: I certainly will. You can do so much within an organization, it’s really amazing. You can really positively impact on a lot of other people in their daily lives whether inside or outside the organization. But we’ll see how I do!

SSON: So let’s wrap up. What advice could you give to an individual or a team embarking on shared services?

NS: If you’re going to establish shared services you need to understand two concepts. The first one is: why, and who are the sponsors? What does an organization think it can get from shared services? And understanding if there have been any attempts in the past and what were the outcomes of those attempts. So that’s a really important piece.

The second piece is a bit about understanding the organization’s culture and life-cycle. So in a command-and-control, why would you attempt a shared service model?

The glue that keeps it all together is knowing what leadership model you’re going to bring into the SSO. Your classic line manager is one thing, but you need influencing skills and negotiation skills at all levels. Shared services clients are always there, whereas in any other organisation I think the average interaction with your customers in financial services is around four times a year; so this understanding of the client’s access is really crucial, and you need the best leadership for that. Finally, if you only focus on getting all of your transactions and processes and data perfect before you move up the value chain, you’ll never get there.

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Shared Services Excellence Award-winner Interview: Steve Hodgson, Hmps

Shared Services Excellence Award-winner Interview: Steve Hodgson, Hmps

SSON: Can we have a bit of background, Steve? Tell us about how the HMPS journey began and how you got involved.

Steve Hodgson: I joined HMPS in 2005 to establish a shared service for them, which is how and when I became involved. The Prison Service had a program to transform its support functions (HR, procurement and finance functions); this program was set up with shared services and an ERP solution at its heart with a go-live date of April 2006. Its objectives were to improve the service, and to reduce the cost of the service, whilst also enabling improved performance in its mainstream business through better control systems, and better management information. That was the objective.

SSON: Who had ownership of this program – where was the impetus for change coming from?

SH: In particular, the board of the Prison Service. Obviously the functional directors – the finance director, the procurement director, the HR director – had a particular interest in their own areas, but they all needed a similar capability which was a shared service and the IT that underpinned it.

SSON: What’s the governance structure?

SH: If I tell you the history of it, it’ll make more sense! Although it was originally conceived as a shared service for the Prison Service, during 2006 we agreed that we would begin to deliver services for the Home Office, which is a separate government department now. That went live in February this year. That puts some context on your question about how it’s governed. It’s a cost centre within the Prison Service and it’s part of the finance function – that’s just somewhere for it to reside really. We have a Service Level Agreement with the customers – so one with the Prison Service and one with the Home Office – and alongside that SLA, which defines the services and the standards to which they’ll be delivered, there is a budget allocation to cover the cost of it. So the service and cost are governed through that process.

The processes are aligned through what we call a policy gateway; so for example how we transact HR transactions, is aligned with HR policy, and there’s a similar set-up for finance and procurement. That’s the point at which we discuss with the policy owners, or agree with the policy owners in the business, any change in process which impacts on policy, and where any change in policy which impacts on process is brokered.

SSON: What’s your role? Whereabouts do you fit in that process?

SH: I’m the Head of Shared Service, so I’m responsible for running the shared service operation. I report to the finance director in the Prison Service, but I also report to a steering board made up of board members from the Prison Service and board members from the Home Office. The steering board is the overarching governance.

SSON: Where are you based and how many employees do you have currently?

SH: In shared services we currently have somewhere in the order of 800 employees. Of those approximately 500 are based in Newport in South Wales, which is the shared service centre, and of those 500 just under 400 are at work in the Prison Service account and just over 100 – rising to 240 by the end of this year – deal with the Home Office account. We also run a prison service training college in a place called Newbold Revel, near Rugby, and that is a big training centre where predominantly we train new prison officers; there are about 100 employees there.

Then the rest of the staff are based in one of the following three operations: field-based teams, which is where the recruiters are (we recruit people out across the UK; we don’t keep recruiters in the SSC, they’re geographically based); regionally-based trainers, to deliver training where it needs to be delivered close to the point of use; and we have a number of purchasing teams who do low-value high-volume transactions for things which cannot be bought from catalogue. We run i-procurement so the vast majority of transactions go through self-service, but if you can’t get it on a catalogue and you can’t use your purchasing card you can raise a non-catalogue requisition, which is a manual transaction. We do those.

SSON: Were these installations built to order or did you occupy existing sites?

SH: The Newport one was a brand-new empty building which we kitted out, so it actually looks like a SSC. The one in Rugby looks like a cross between a stately home and a teaching college. I think there’s a hundred bedrooms – it’s something which you wouldn’t commonly find in shared services. It’s not unique but it’s unusual.

SSON: Turning to the Shared Services Excellence Awards: you won Best New Shared Services Operation of the Year 2008. What was it, do you think, that set you apart from your competitors?

SH: I think there are a couple of things really. One is the scale and pace of the change – we’ve gone from no shared service to a multi-customer, multi-service-line shared service in less than two years – at scale, so we service 75,000 employees across the Prison Service and the Home Office. I think the second one was probably the maturity of some of our practices; we already have quite a lot of automation self-service; we’ve used, since we started, Six Sigma process improvement. I think those are probably the two main reasons.

SSON: To what extent has your personal experience been a key factor in these endeavours?

SH: For me this is the third one of these that I’ve done at any scale, which obviously helps: you know what you want it to look like when you start out, so you have the end in mind from the beginning.

SSON: To do all this in two years is impressive: was that the rate which you had in mind from the start?

SH: The Prison Service had the ambition to do it at that pace. What it didn’t have was the ambition to take that second customer. So that’s the kind of ‘exceeded expectation’ element of it. The reason for doing that was that it’s reduced the Prison Service operating costs by over £2m [m] a year because the overhead is spread over a much wider user-base.

SSON: What kind of benchmarking have you done to measure achievement and how successful have you been in hitting your targets?

SH: We’ve benchmarked the services using PWC, so we used the PWC Saratoga benchmarks. We’ve found that in some areas we’re already upper-quartile, and in most areas we are median or better.

SSON: And how long did it take to get there?

SH: We did the benchmarking at the end of last year. The SSO was designed from the outset to run at pretty much the performance levels we’re at right now.

SSON: What have been the biggest challenges you’ve had to overcome? Obviously taking on that second customer has been a huge one…

SH: I think the biggest challenge is business change. Clearly creating one of these things, going from no people to 500 people, all trained and knowing what they’re doing; implementing pretty much a complete Oracle IT system, is tricky. But the hardest bit is business change: getting 130 jails in England and Wales – 50,000 people – to change the way they do things. For example they’ve gone from everything being paper-based and done locally, to increasing amounts of self-service all done from Wales, no local contact, in just under two years. So that’s been a tremendous change for them. And then I guess the third thing is dealing with the things that go wrong: unknown IT, unknown processes, it’s all unproven so things go wrong. Sometimes things happen that you wouldn’t expect would happen: sometimes you have too few people, the IT system doesn’t behave – all those things which are euphemistically referred to as teething problems.

SSON: Has the resistance among general staff more or less been overcome now, or is there still some way to go do you think?

SH: I think there’s still some resistance. I think the approach to what’s seen as resistance is important. We haven’t necessarily always designed a service solution which works for them. And the good news is that they’ll very soon tell you it doesn’t work, and if you change it they’ll cooperate with you. Now a lot of the services they now receive, they’ll say are better. Some were not as good when we initially implemented them, but since then we’ve used process improvements and enhancements in technology to improve those services, so we’ve filled the gaps pretty quickly.

I think that’s what takes them with you. Talk to the average prison officer and say “I run shared services: what do you want from me?” and they’ll say they want to be paid on time, they want their expenses on time, and correctly. Anything else? “Perhaps some training.” This is not rocket science! If you speak to the governors, who run the jails, or the finance people or the HR people, they’ve got a much more sophisticated list of things they want, so they’re much more difficult to satisfy. It’s usually in that area that the battle is won or lost.

SSON: Where are you hoping to go over the next couple of years?

SH: I think if you’re going to run one of these with the workforce based in the UK, with civil service terms and conditions of employment, you have to achieve very high levels of productivity, because otherwise you’re not cost-effective. Our strategy is one of growth: the more users we can put on our systems, the more transactions we can put through this building: that brings unit-costs down. So we’re embarked on a strategy of growth which is what the Home Office project was all about really.

We’re currently preparing a business case to deliver some more service into the Ministry of Justice, and we’re hopeful that’ll get approval later on this year. We have the option of delivering a broader range of services to the same customer base – there’s still some administration activity that goes on in jails for example that would respond to the application of a shared service. So that’s where we’re headed.

SSON: Finally, what advice could you give to someone just embarking upon planning and implementing a large-scale shared service operation in the public sector as you have?

SH: Make sure you’ve got a team around you that knows how to do it. This is not something that should be a journey of discovery: it takes too long and it costs too much money. Set off with a clear vision and a capable team around you that already know how to do this. If you can sort that out, then you’ll probably do ok.

Internet Marketing Services are Using These Same Techniques

Internet Marketing Services are Using These Same Techniques

With the multitude of internet marketing services and techniques that you hear about daily as you get bombarded with promotional material after promotional material in our emails you come to realize two things. The rationalization of these two main focal points are what lead many online marketers to their doom.

The first thing you come to terms with as you start to focus is how truly overwhelming all of this is! You can’t possibly learn all of these new internet marketing techniques fast enough, master them and implement them effectively all at one time so that you can begin to promote your products, services or affiliate programs.

This brings you to the second realization. You need help! So you decide to hire internet marketing services that are provided by outside experts and so called gurus that promise to help you bring in more traffic, help you build your email list and ultimately increase your monthly sales volume. Don’t worry we’ve all made this mistake, but there is light at the end of the tunnel.

Take One Day To Evaluate All Of Your Resources

I can’t stress how important this is. Internet marketing services FEED on your frustrations! They know that you are bombarded daily by emails that you get from other internet marketing veterans that want to sell you their own products and services. In fact they’re counting on the fact that you’ve actually bought and paid for several of these and that at this point you’re so way beyond frustrated that you’ll do anything, even PAY THEM MONEY to provide you their own internet marketing services that are using the same internet marketing techniques that you could be using yourself for free.

Cancel The Majority Of Your Subscriptions

This is hard for most of us to do. We’ve grown to depend on the advice of these so called internet marketing services, experts and gurus. There is a symbiotic co-dependant relationship formed that has gotten you in the rut you’re in. I’m sure that most of the people you get all these emails are nice, but their bottom line is NOT to be you’re friend. They want to make money online just like YOU want to make money online. The key thing to consider here is that you need to STOP giving them your money and STOP spending all that time reading the tons and tons of emails, so that you can focus on what works and take action.

Stop Paying Internet Marketing Service Providers

This is often the hardest link in your chain to break. What little success that you’ve achieved thus far is only there because of your internet marketing efforts. In that back of your mind you’re telling yourself that the internet marketing services that are provided by online providers are working, just not quite as well as you want them too. The truth is that their using the exact same internet marketing techniques that everyone else is and these techniques are NOT hard to learn! When you stop paying for all the internet marketing services and start focusing your time and money more directly on taking ACTION you’ll notice that you’re paying out less money and yet at the same time your monthly income and website page ranks are still increasing.

Now Is The Time To Take Action And Start Profiting

I realize that things are still very overwhelming, especially if you’re just getting started or if you’ve have a history of trial and error which has brought you in little or no success. Take a deep breath, relax, relate, release and let go of that past that has haunted you. Let go of the overwhelming frustration that comes from inexperience if that is the problem. Internet marketing services and all these so called new internet marketing techniques are NOT the answer. Here’s a clue to get you started;

Social Networking & Social Marketing Is Not New

From the early days of the internet there have been internet marketing services that provided advertising services on bulletin boards, which later lead people to going online using dial up connections and creating social networks of their own through their AOL or other ISP connections. This is how things were done in the early days. What has changed isn’t the concept of social networking & marketing or internet marketing services. The real change that people are talking so much about with the whole buzz of the Web 2.0 craze isn’t social networking & marketing at all, it’s the fact that it’s become so incredibly easy!

With WYSIWYG The Learning Curve Is No Longer Steep

Social Networking & Marketing is definitely getting more popular with the WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) interfaces that we see on MySpace, Squidoo, YouTube, FaceBook and the “groups” that you can join through Yahoo, MSN and the almighty Google. The new advancements make things easy to customize, add video and in many cases create your own “squeeze page” that you can publish and then use to promote your products, services and affiliate programs. This is now secret to the internet marketing services that many of you are already paying for. Using these same principals there are online blogs and forums that you can use as well and these are no secret either. The only thing that makes it harder for newbies and people who have failed in the past is that they either don’t know HOW, they don’t know WHERE or they don’t fully understand WHY certain things are done the way they are.

One last thing to give you something to think about before I go…..

Please bare in mind that this is solely based on my own biased opinion, which comes from years of experience as a web designer, web host and internet marketing promoter. My thoughts on all of this are simple if you would like to save an incredible amount of time, energy and money. Try by focusing on ONE THING at a time and learn everything you can. There are video, audio and pdf style tutorials readily available at reasonable prices. All you need to do is find ONE SOURCE that you can get as much material from as possible at a reasonable price and then begin your learning experience.

Go in to this with an open mind though. Often you may think that YOU KNOW something, when in truth you are familiar with what it is and the basics of how it works, but you’re not yet proficient enough to be called an “expert”…..yet. I add that last little bit because I believe that with the right tutoring you can and will be one!

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Purchasing Office Supplies Online- Shared By Omni Services Gainesville TX

Purchasing Office Supplies Online- Shared By Omni Services Gainesville TX

Re-Posted by Omni Services Gainesville TX

This article discusses how to buy home office supplies online as well as some tips on chosing the best quality products.

Pens, sticky notes, rulers, calculators and calendars are just some of the provisions which are in most cases found in a regular office desk. They are used in daily business operations. These same supplies can also be used as advertising tools. they could bear your company name or logo and spread your message across a big ranges of people.

Logo imprinted office products give you an choice to the usual marketing tools propagating in the market today. they’ll be utilized not just in the office but in other places as well. Students could use them in school while homemakers may need it at their daily chores. Aside from that they have many other uses.

Once you print your company name or logo inside the space allotted you immediately get office promotional items. Since they are now more personalized people will be able to identify it with your organization. These desktop promotional items will surely help them in remembering you. you may also also use it as an prize or reward to employees who are doing their job excellently. Once they observe that their hard work pays off, they will be motivated to carry out more.

See the other profits of logo imprinted office supplies:

1. Optimum Printing Space – You are given more than enough branding space during your corporate name or logo.

2. An Assortment of Items – there are millions of office and desk items to pick from. You do not need to fret about the possibilities of monotony or routine because you can easily offer options to your customers.

3. Affordability – Customized office supplies are relatively economical items. They offer first-class quality for a very minimal price. That means lots of savings for you!

4. Handy and Portable – Most promotional desktop items are very useful so your customers won’t be able have a difficult time keeping or storing them.

5. Green office supplies are all the rage today. Business like to show they are doing their bit for the environment by bying green friendly office supplies.

Now that you realize these pieces of information, it’s now time to arm yourself with rules in buying customized office products:

1. Start with a Budget Plan – Keep in mind to always prioritize your finances. This will help keep you along to threat or the risk of overspending. You don’t want to waste money on items you don’t need right? Formulate a sound budget plan and adhere to it.

2. Balance Promotional Items – Since your selection is desk and office supplies it will be a good idea to match related items when giving it to your customers or clients. An example would be a pen and a notepad or any other items that would balance each other.

3. Purchase in Big Batches – These publicity items are non-perishable so you do not need to worry about potential wastes. you may also order a great batch and just store extra items for future use. Since they are handy these products won’t be able take up much storage area.

Omni Services Gainesville TX

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SANTANNA ENERGY SERVICES NEW MASS MARKETING INITATIVES PUT CUSTOMERS FIRST

SANTANNA ENERGY SERVICES NEW MASS MARKETING INITATIVES PUT CUSTOMERS FIRST

Consumers now have more options when it comes to choosing utilities.

Santanna Energy Services, an Austin, Texas-based energy marketing company, offers “Customer Choice” programs.  Santanna’s “Customer Choice” programs allow residential, commercial and industrial customers in Illinois and Michigan to choose a natural gas supplier other than their local utility.  The utility still reads the meter and takes care of the billing, but Santanna supplies the gas.

Because Santanna recognizes that today’s customers expect quality and professional experiences from the initial phone contact onwards, Santanna ensures the marketing representatives follow the company’s strict policies and procedures when marketing it’s various “Choice” programs.

Santanna’s executive team redesigned its operating procedures in early 2007 and put in place a more rigorous program which is monitored and enforced throughout the system.  Santanna has contracts with numerous marketing companies with hundreds of representatives, and these policies protect the customers and Santanna Energy Services.

Each sales representative is required to use a script that has been reviewed by state utilities and regulating authorities to describe the details of the program being offered to prospective customers.  The marketing company records all conversations between a prospect and a sales representative to enable the subsequent recovery and monitoring of any communication in case of any questionable interaction.

Some of the calls are “live” monitored to ensure the script is being adhered to and that all communication is carried out respectfully and professionally. Representatives not meeting the standards are terminated from the Santanna program.

“These protections are time consuming and costly but are imperative for the protection of the prospect and for Santanna,” explained Wayne Gatlin, president and CEO of Santanna Energy Services.  “The majority of marketing companies and their representatives are disciplined and professional, but Santanna’s systems have to guard against any who fail to reach our standards. Our mission is to have all our prospects and customers fully satisfied with the solicitation and the overall program.”

Customers are told during the sales presentation and again in the confirmation process that they have 30 days to change their mind, without cost or penalty. Within about a week, they receive a welcome letter from Santanna repeating the terms and conditions expressed in the original solicitation. This is the third opportunity for customers to voice their choice of participating, or not participating, in the program. Santanna is possibly the only company currently offering this no cost, no penalty grace period.  A 24-hour toll-free cancellation hot line is also available for any customers wishing to change their minds, and Santanna does not charge any customer a cancellation fee.

Prospects who do choose to participate in Santanna’s program are connected to a Third Party Verification company (TPV), with their permission, to confirm their choice and verify their understanding. A percentage of the verification tapes also are monitored for compliance to the scripts and the professional conduct of the TPV agents.  Santanna prospects who are not interested in the Customer Choice programs are added to an internal “do not call” list to avoid being solicited further.

Internet Marketing Consulting Services

Internet Marketing Consulting Services

The concept of internet marketing is not new. However, the positive use of the Internet has been constantly benefiting the organizations to reach to its ultimate clients effectively in comparatively less time. Internet marketing has proven an effective method for an organization to promote, advertise, sell, or distribute products or services in the market.

Internet marketing is quite techno-functional; therefore a person needs to be abreast with the changing technological trends otherwise it would be difficult to remain competitive in the Internet market.

Services included in Internet Marketing Services

As states earlier, the basic concept of internet marketing is to increase your web presence and attracting potential to join your business requirements. Internet marketing consulting services includes SEO services, web designing, web site promotion consultation and site reviews, site optimization, and many others. Moreover, internet marketing consulting can be done by different means to provide the better results. The basic known services of internet marketing services includes in-house IM consulting, over-the-phone consulting, training, one-on-one or entire group consulting, hourly basis consulting, and monthly consulting.

The special service of training can be availed through email, newsletters, and promotional content formatting, message previewing, outgoing message editing, display formatting, personalized messaging, link structures to search engines, and many others; matching to your needs and requirements.

Benefits

Market is expanding day-by-day, giving a chance for companies to grow and compete in order to provide the best to its ultimate customers. These services help new aspects of online business and product offerings to grow and serve people better. With these services, you can provide expert advice to promote products, increase the number of viewers visiting a web site, and increase brand awareness as whole.

Since the market is expanding day-by-day, companies require an expert and skilled opinion to gain from the ongoing marketing wave. In order to avail the best benefits of online business demands, regular updation of technology and market environments is required. However, by approaching the right Internet marketing consulting experts, one can get their website to pull its share of the load and add new business.

Internet Marketing Consultants are professional people, specialized in helping businesses grow with a variety of internet marketing consulting services. By implementing different strategic methods, these experts strive to provide higher return on investment for companies.

Internet marketing is transforming the companies’ prospects and with the help of internet marketing consultants, appropriate consulting can be availed.

Make Your Business Profitable by Internet Marketing Services

Make Your Business Profitable by Internet Marketing Services

Any products or services, to become profitable, need proper marketing. The concept of proper marketing not only entails introduction of the products or services into the market but also doing that in such a manner that promotes them. Marketing shows to the people that a particular product is available in the market while proper marketing convince people to purchase that product. Internet marketing services are dedicated to doing just that for your products or services.

It is a fact that all entrepreneurs do not have the skills to market and promote their products. The product or the service can be great but it is worthless without effective and efficient marketing. We all are aware of the fact that in today’s world, Internet has become a popular place to market the products or services. If you hire professional Internet marketing services uk, you will able to break through the world of Internet even without any proper marketing skills. A website marketing company uk is dedicated to introduce and promote your product or service in the market through Internet. Because of such Internet marketing services only, your company gets attention and recognition and due to increased exposure, people want to purchase your products or services. The Internet marketing services uk accomplish their goals through following ways of Internet marketing uk:
•    Connections: Mostly, the entrepreneurs, especially the new ones, do not know whom to contact for their marketing requirements. A website marketing company uk has a lot of connections in the market through which they truly make their work efficient. Therefore, these service providers are able to connect your company with people who may be helpful for your business.
•    Skills: Internet marketing uk service providers have all the skills such as search engine marketing uk that are required for performing effective services and marketing your business. Such skills include networking, web designing and all other skills needed for promoting your company over the net. These skills are the main attraction of these companies and this is why people like to hire these service providers for being successful in their goals.
•    Resources: If you are running a company and handling a business, then you must have a clear idea about the limit of resources available in the market. Hiring these professional services will be extremely helpful as they will be able to give you access to all the resources you need for your business. This means that these services providers are able to provide you all the tools that are necessary for Internet marketing including search engine marketing uk tools. Resources are extremely important for any business and your skills will be useless until you apply them on these resources. A combination of skills and resources will be beneficial for the promotion of your business.
As the potential of Internet lies in commerce in today’s world, the Internet marketing services are very much in demand by almost each and every company. They can make themselves popular through the source of Internet and as Internet is not confined with boundaries, the business can reach out to the entire world.

Accounting services Business Run Smoothly

Accounting services Business Run Smoothly

To be successful in this cut-throat competition business world is very tough particularly if you are not too familiar with the diverse strategies which are needed to make a business successful. If you cannot make a success story out of your business, there is no use of operating a business. You must have to undertake some strategies to run your business successful. These strategies are accounting, bookkeeping, marketing, promotion, production and manufacturing. Now what a business owner needs to do is prioritize work – what need to be done on priority basis. And this will vary greatly from business to business. Accounting help is something that any business requires to embark on, in particular if you are operating a large scale business. If you are running a small or mid-size business than you can easily handle the accounting work without obtaining professional assistance.

Accounting is something that no one can avoid and therefore one must ensure that they get the best professionals to do the work for them. There are quite a lot of companies that offer accounting help with other bookkeeping and accounting services to individuals and business owners who are looking out for these services. If you have a glance at global accounting outsourcing statistics, you will notice that an increasingly large number of businesses are undertaking this strategy for their business success. Hence, if your name is yet to be in those statistics, it is a good time for you to seek accounting help for your business. There are number of advantages of outsourcing your accounting, and this is the cause why there is a vast flow in the number of business owners and entrepreneurs opening up to the idea of outsourcing their work.

Accounting will help a business or organization to keep a proper record of all the financial aspect. Therefore, every individual or business requires keeping a track of all the financial dealings that they do on a daily basis. Because this is the only thing that will measure how well or how bad their business is doing. Many times it happens that the person managing the accounting and other financial aspect of the business does not make a habit to keep track on all the financial records on daily or weekly basis. Thus, business owner may not get the proper picture for their business – how good or how bad business is doing. This is true especially with small and mid-size businesses. It is very vital to have all the things well organized and documented, especially if you are of those who forget things.

As stated earlier, the strategy, which is necessary to maintain the accounts of your business properly, is different for every business. Thus, the professional who offers the accounting assistance to your business have to make sure that he is completely conscious about all the diverse aspects of your business. And, based on this make a decision – what will be the most excellent way to handle the accounts and finance of your business. Accounting, when done correctly, can do wonders to your business.

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Online Shopping for Office Supplies – Brought To You By Omni Services Gainesville Texas

Online Shopping for Office Supplies – Brought To You By Omni Services Gainesville Texas

Buying Stationary Online

Reposted by Omni Services Gainesville TX

As a business owner or office manager you have to make sure your employees have all the stationery items needed in order to get their work done. Sometimes keeping track of all stationery and office supplies can be a tough task and for this reason opening an online account with an office supplier might be the right thing to do in order to make sure you will never run out of stationery items.

The most obvious reason to buy your stationery and office supplies items online is to avoid a potential trip to the high street retailer which means saving time and most probably saving money as well. Ordering online has become a fast process and most of the stationery supplies websites would save your order in an archive so you will see your ordered products next time when you decide to shop. Another benefit is that most of the online shops offer free delivery if you usually buy office supplies over 50 so you will get your ordered products right to your door without lifting a finger!

Buying online can also be considered environmentally friendly especially in regards with the delivery of goods. The ordered products are transported only once from warehouse to you instead of being transported from warehouse to the retailer and then to you so it helps to reduce the carbon footprint. This is also reflected in the costs as the items won’t have any additional fees and will be cheaper than buying on highstreet.

Most of the online retailers have great discounts on their products especially if you decide to buy in bulk, discounts you won’t be able to find at street stores. This is mainly because the expenses of the online retailer (bills, rent, etc…) are much smaller than an offline shop.

There are a few small disadvantages when you buy your office supplies online, and one of them is that you can not phisically see or handle the items you are purchasing. Although this small disadvantage, the fact that you can get it at a discounted price, it is worth to take the risk.
When you order your office supplies online, it may take a few days for your goods to be delivered to you, but if you are ordering in advance you will receive the goods before you need them.

I believe that the future of online office supplies is an automated system that will re-order supplies when they are running low. The system will be linked to the inventory and stock control and is a system that will flourish in the future.

Another great thing that comes with buying your office supplies online, is that you can use your supplies to make personalized stationary, greeting cards and even gifts (as long as the gifts aren’t paid for by the company you work for.) If you own your own business, it is a great way to save money, maybe even send personalized thank you cards to your clients. Savings all around!

Reposted by Omni Services Gainesville TX

Form Processing Services or Form Data Entry Services India – Hire Form Processing Offshore Teams in INDIA – Online Form Processing Outsourcing India

Form Processing Services or Form Data Entry Services India – Hire Form Processing Offshore Teams in INDIA – Online Form Processing Outsourcing India

Outsourcing form processing involves capturing, digitizing and processing of data from various resources and converting them into a data base for effective analysis and research. Converting raw data into a specified format of information is termed as data processing.

Traditional paper-based communications has many drawbacks; expensive, time consuming, susceptible to errors are just to name a few. Forms processing service delivers variety of solutions which covers Medical Claim Forms, Survey Forms, Insurance Claim Forms, Market Research Forms, Rebate Forms, Tax Forms, Subscription Forms and Other Forms.

Forms Processing involves extracting information from structured or customized forms, faxes and scanned images and updating it on a range of outputs. At Adept, we regularly process surveys, questionnaires and application forms. Our form processing services help organizations convert large volumes of documents into electronic formats for convenient storage and easy retrieval. 

Our website design services include: 

- Legal Forms processing
- Tax Forms processing
- Insurance Claim Forms processing
- Coupon Redemption Forms processing
- Patient Records processing
- Shipping Documents processing
- Product Registration Cards processing
- Credit Card Applications processing
- Immigration Forms processing
- Medical Claim Forms processing
- Online Form Processing facility
- Survey Forms processing
- Rental Forms processing
- Membership Application Forms processing
- Bankruptcy Form Processing
- Invoice / Purchase Order Forms processing
- E-mail Forms processing
- Resumes Processing 

We do form processing by manual data entry method or with automation. We fill in hundreds of forms — medical insurance claim forms, survey forms, market research forms , HTML forms , CGI forms, ASP, JSP and PHP forms, legal forms, e-mail forms, questionnaires, medical claim forms, processing online forms, resume form – in our life. If you are interested in finding out more detail information about our automatic form processing services to outsource your forms processing tasks.

For more details, please visit us at http://www.adeptdataservices.com

Adept Data Services
(New Delhi, INDIA)

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