From Print to Online: Organizational Change Management

Overview

Our client, a global financial firm, engaged Concurrency to facilitate a major change of business model that had been in place for over twenty years—convert the content of an annually printed book that was distributed by themselves and partners, into an e-commerce platform that supports subscription-based access for external customers and network accessible access to the clients’ internal employees. 

Concurrency was deeply involved in both the technical design and implementation of this endeavor as well as the organizational change management needed to make it successful.

Impact

The shift from print to online had the potential to substantially increase our clients’ revenue and reach with this product.  The speed that a customer would now have access to the data or to updated data that they use to perform complex calculations increased exponentially. 

Rolling out an e-commerce/subscription platform for thousands of users, who traditionally purchased a physical book and cross-referenced tables to calculate specific values, could generate an increased level of risk to overall customer satisfaction.  To offset that risk we provided extensive input on the level and type of support that would be needed—both at initial launch and ongoing—to ensure successful conversion of print customers to online customers.

Process

We guided our client on the facets of technical support and customer service needed to be successful with this new platform. This included the initial knowledge transfer and ongoing support to the client’s internal IT teams and to a newly created customer service group.

During the initial go-live our resources acted as second and third-tier IT service management (ITSM) groups while also coordinating the clients’ teams for triage and subject matter expert (SME) application support.

Communication

Our process returned again and again to distilling support needs to our client’s technical team. It’s not enough to identify technical needs. It’s essential to ensure everyone is thinking from the customers’ perspective—putting themselves in the customers’ shoes and preparing accordingly.

We also guided our client on internal communications with employees on the product team itself. Moving from publishing print materials to working closely with the IT team was, not surprisingly, a huge change for them.

Training

From a technical perspective, this project represented our client’s first workload to run exclusively in the cloud with no internal servers. We provided Azure training to our client’s IT team to ensure everyone understood necessary aspects of how the product worked. As Concurrency’s development team worked on the product design and implementation, our organizational change management team held weekly meetings with our client’s IT team to communicate the latest details.

Conclusion

We were onsite for the initial product go-live as customers first accessed the new online system. Call logs reflect that the volume of customer support needs has decreased drastically since initial rollout, as expected. Our client successfully migrated a core business function from print to online, creating new revenue opportunities.