Achieve Safety Ltd Case Study

Achieve Safety are a training company whose clients include the likes of General Electric, United Utilities, Atkins and the London 2012 Olympics. They work with blue chip organisations to deliver high quality training courses covering health, safety and hygiene. These are either in group workshops delivered throughout the country or in-house training workshops as required.

With over 25 years experience in the business, their qualified and highly experienced staff deliver training courses targeted towards individual business needs. A selection of the courses they work with include SHEA Gas Training, SHEA Water Training, Water Hygiene Card Training, EUSR Training Courses and more.

Challenge

The challenge for Achieve Safety was that they felt their digital systems including website and processes were lagging behind where they needed to be in the modern world. Many of the processes were manual and time consuming for staff to manage.

They came to us with an open mind, wanting us to get under the skin of the business to review how things currently worked so we could identify solutions to modernise their entire systems and save a lot of time in the process. By being open minded about the process, this allowed us to take a greater look throughout the whole business to see what opportunities there were to make everything work much more efficiently.

Strategy

With many aspects of the business being reviewed as part of the process, the strategy was first to work through a fact finding piece of research to fully immerse ourselves in the business to understand how things currently work. By doing this, we identified many legacy systems, cobbled together technologies and more which we could see a clear path for a staged set of improvements over the next few months.

When working closely with a business throughout the entire organisation and systems, this requires a sensitive approach to improvements and recommendations as there are always legacy challenges to overcome. As such, when reviewing the entirety of the business we were keen on gathering all of the facts before making any solid recommendations to ensure the solutions would be sustainable and work long term for the business.

Results

The results to date have been transformational for Achieve Safety in terms of how their sales process now works efficiently through digital channels, how their customer relationship management activities work seamlessly along with significantly reducing day to day administration activities by automating many of the processes.

Website Technologies

The initial research identified many website technologies in use, primarily WordPress related, which were outdated, insecure and not working effectively. As such, we put in place a plan to improve each of these over time to streamline the entire technology stack in the background to make maintaining, improving and tweaking everything simple and straight forward. Naturally, this involved throwing out many of the inadequate technologies that had been implemented previously and replacing these with high performance technologies that are going to be suitable for years to come.

Training Courses

With a variety of training courses on offer being run throughout the country, a simple and effective way of managing this whole process was essential. We integrated an online training course calendar which automatically created attendee lists and enabled staff to check attendees into the session. This also included core information being sent through to the attendees prior to the workshop and after too which saved significant time in managing this process manually previously.

Ecommerce Payments

Traditionally in the business to business world, payments are made via bank transfer on invoice upon completion of the work on the whole. Over recent years we have been seeing a shift in how businesses operate to make their payment systems much more efficient with businesses often preferring to pay for small purchases of less than a few thousand pounds on a credit or debit card instead of paying with bank transfer. As such, we implemented an ecommerce payment solution which allowed clients to book onto training courses and pay up front which helped to save significant time for everyone in the process and payment up front always improves the cash flow for any business. This was so successful that the payment gateway provider temporarily suspended the account as they believed the account was being used for money laundering.

Website Management

Manging any website on a day to day basis should be simple and straight forward. Previously it wasn’t which is why we worked to get the right underlying technology in place on the website so that Achieve Safety could manage everything their self with ease. Once implemented, this meant their website was now fully responsive and working on mobile phones, tablets and laptops, with a fresh look and feel which can be customised as they see fit over time. In addition to this, additional functionality that was integrated into the website meant that further time could be saved by duplicating regular events to avoid having to keep typing up each event manually.

Digital Strategy

Reviewing the digital strategy that was in place identified that this wasn’t going to cut it in the modern digital world we live in. As such, we created a strategy that was going to be suitable for Achieve Safety for the next few years by building a strong and reputable brand on the back of the quality of work that they do. This naturally involved many of the activities above and more to work towards this goal which is an on-going process.