Calyx enables Federation of Small Businesses to boost member service

London 26 September, 2011 - Leading independent managed service provider Calyx is providing the Federation of Small Businesses (FSB) with IT infrastructure and support that is enabling the organisation to boost customer service for its 200,000 plus membership and 160 support staff while reducing system management costs. 

Calyx has provided FSB with a managed service for ICT infrastructure, website, e-mail and office facilities. It is also supporting the federation’s customer relationship management (CRM) system that underpins its contact centre operations. Calyx completed the transition to managed service operations in the spring of this year.

London 26 September, 2011 - Leading independent managed service provider Calyx is providing the Federation of Small Businesses (FSB) with IT infrastructure and support that is enabling the organisation to boost customer service for its 200,000 plus membership and 160 support staff while reducing system management costs. 

Calyx has provided FSB with a managed service for ICT infrastructure, website, e-mail and office facilities. It is also supporting the federation’s customer relationship management (CRM) system that underpins its contact centre operations. Calyx completed the transition to managed service operations in the spring of this year. 

The Blackpool-based federation provides a range of tax, legal advice and business services for over 200,000 of Britain’s small businesses while also lobbying for their interests. The FSB’s head of Systems and Data, Ian Martin, wanted to provide more dynamic service capabilities and streamlined support systems to handle growing workloads for the different IT, advisory and contact centre teams as the organisation had surged to the current membership levels in only a few short years.

Under the managed service, the FSB’s IT team is seeing a reduced number of incident calls from staff under the Calyx managed service and any technical issues are being resolved more quickly. In addition, FSB staff can better prioritise workloads and respond more effectively to support requests and queries from members and staff, while consigning its last remaining paper-based back office systems to history.  Calyx’s managed service expertise has advised further system improvements to support ongoing enhancements parallel to the way FSB develops its member service.

The federation’s IT board chose Calyx after a rigorous market testing process. Members agreed that Calyx had the best grasp of the organisation’s IT needs, technical competences, competitive commercial terms, and the most customer-focused approach.

Peter Scargill, National IT chairman at the Federation of Small Businesses, said: “From the off, Calyx always had a clear view of what we needed. We were prepared to continue outsourcing IT since we run distributed IT systems but now we have ‘second generation’ managed IT services to enable us to focus much more closely on members’ needs.”

Niall O’Regan, director of managed services at Calyx, comments: “Our work for the FSB shows how a customer-centric member organisation can still transform its service capabilities while reducing overall maintenance costs through a managed service arrangement. This programme is already freeing up IT staff time to concentrate on members’ and colleagues’ needs.”