Mike Wilkinson, Author at CACI

Delivering agency staffing efficiencies across the NHS

Posted on: 26 September 2022

NHS Trusts face a number of staffing challenges for a multitude of reasons, from patient demand to effectively and efficiently utilising budgets to making use of agency staff to plug any gaps. Agency staff offer a vital support service to NHS Trusts in delivering key, frontline services, but how can they be utilised more efficiently to save costs and enhance service delivery?

Recruiting agency staff can be an expensive process as their per hour costs can far exceed those of bank staff. It is, therefore, crucial that NHS Trusts are able to make the most efficient use of their bank staff before calling upon agency staff. When agency staff are drafted in, they must also be utilised efficiently to maximise the benefit of the extra spend in recruiting them.

Monitoring their workload and communicating clearly with them is crucial to achieving this. They must be treated in the same manner as bank staff in order that they can help support your services effectively. After a 12-week period of working within your services, agency staff also assume the same benefits as bank staff in terms of holiday, sick pay, overtime and breaks. This needs to be factored in to how they are rostered onto jobs and the longer-term planning of your rostering.

Decreasing agency staff spend

There are a number of ways that NHS Trusts can reduce their reliance and spend on agency staff, from retaining existing staff to effectively recruiting new permanent members.

Training and career development can play a key role in this, offering existing staff the opportunity to improve their skillset. This carries the double benefit of offering them opportunities within your Trust and making them more flexible from a rostering perspective. With an expanded skillset, they can be utilised across a wider range of tasks, meaning that where short term gaps emerge, it becomes easier to re-jig existing rosters across your bank staff to fill in the gaps.

This dovetails with competency management, understanding the skills at your disposal in rostering staff for tasks. With improved training you can expand the competencies at your disposal and recruit from within for emerging vacancies. Mandatory ongoing training can be implemented, ensuring that everyone is up to date with their training.

Recruitment is also a key area for NHS Trusts. Keeping the right people performing the right tasks is easier when you can rely on bank staff, so bringing in the right people carries huge benefits. Finding more permanent solutions to emerging gaps is also preferable to mixing and matching with agency staff.

Investing in your staff with training opportunities, career progression and the provision of relevant working opportunities will not only help to keep existing staff members working for you, but will also help with recruiting new staff in demonstrating that you can offer career progression.

Managing agency staff

Where agency staff are necessary – and they always will be in certain circumstances – it is vital to maximise their efficiency and output. Effective communication from management is hugely beneficial, providing a clear roadmap for what is expected and making clear their responsibilities. Encouraging collaboration with your existing staff helps agency staff to settle in quickly and work towards the team’s goals.

e-Rostering

Lord Carter’s 2016 and 2018 reports on operational productivity in the NHS recommend all NHS provider organisations use an e-rostering system for all clinical staff groups. His reviews found that organisations have not always used the full potential of e-rostering systems to maximise the productivity of their workforce and reduce administrative time spent planning rosters.

Furthermore, Lord Carter’s reports suggest that rosters should be approved six weeks in advance. Having this operational foresight is crucial for NHS Trusts in making efficient use of available staffing resources.

E-rostering solutions also facilitate a greater degree of automation throughout the scheduling process. This frees up the time of administrative staff to focus upon exceptions and further driving operational insight with staffing reports.

This can help to ensure that use of agency staff is necessary and applied appropriately. Is the requirement for agency staff being driven by actual demand, or by poor management? Creating operational insight from your rostering drives better decision making.

Joining the dots

Using a single system can bring together your training, competency management and rostering into one solution, making consideration of multiple factors easy and seamless. Generating operational insight, you can easily identify where staff shortages are likely to occur and make moves to rectify them.

Utilising e-rostering functionality further enhances decision making around agency staff and brings transparency to the process and the decision making. Moving from time consuming manual process makes the process of rostering, training and recruitment far easier and more transparent.

By joining the processes that govern your staffing requirements together, it is possible to create greater efficiencies in the use of your bank staff, reducing the need to employ agency staff to plug the gaps. And where agency staff are required, you can deliver greater insight and understanding as to why.

Find out how Cygnum can help.

Why data insight projects fail and how to succeed – Part 2

Posted on: 20 August 2021

In this 4-part blog series, we look at some of the common reasons data projects fail and the key underlying solutions that can help businesses improve project success rates. Part 1 dealt with outcome misalignment and the problems of a project failing to align with business strategy. This time we look at estimates and what problems they can cause.

Estimates – Balancing the books and the benefits

Almost every organisation would like to deliver more for less in the shortest space of time – after all, who wouldn’t?!

When undertaking any project, you’re going to need to provide estimates on the time it will take, the resource you will need and how much it will cost. This will likely first be highlighted in your business case or business analysis for the project.

Estimates can present challenges for many IT departments, where often the focus is on “how much is it going to cost?” and pressure on how to keep that number as low as possible. While some projects have a relatively low investment, larger enterprise projects will require a significant investment from the business.

This is an area where your business case is absolutely critical for your project to secure the stamp of approval. Many projects are not approved at this stage due to a poorly developed and formulated business case.

The very best project can be delivered but, if the business case was not correctly targeted, the outcome delivered will miss the mark.

There is a need to pivot the conversation within businesses. The conversation should not look at “how much is this going to cost?”. The question should be “how does that add value to what we do?”. The best business case is written from a perspective of the reward far outweighing the risk. Being able to articulate business benefits will automatically shift the narrative from the negative to the positive.

Project cost is relative. Delivering 10 cheap projects that all fail is not good business. Delivering a single project with a greater level of investment that improves the outcomes of customers, whether directly or indirectly, should be far more preferable.

To avoid the possibility of your project not being approved – especially in the case where the size of investment may give stakeholders the need for pause – it’s crucially important to:

Define the need within the business: current problems or gaps your recommended solution will solve
Determine the desired outcomes: describe the positive improvements to the business when your solution is implemented

Risk

Without a well-developed business case, your project may not be approved – meaning it’s failed before it’s begun. Lowering costs on your estimates in order to gain sign off may increase project failure risks or mean you need to request further investment halfway through. Overcome this challenge by creating a persuasive business case which shows your stakeholders why the need for this solution is business critical and highlight the valuable outcomes your solution will help them achieve.

Reward

Well developed business cases are not only more likely to be approved, but also facilitate a successful outcome delivery with the most business benefit.

Our team of Business Analysts work with organisations across the UK at the beginning of data journeys to build impactful and persuasive business cases that help secure investment in a solution best fit for purpose. Find out how our team could help you.

Next time, we’ll look at how project scope can impact delivery, benefits realisation and affect managing expectations on your projects.

Why data insight projects fail and how to succeed – Part 1

Posted on: 12 August 2021

Reports across every industry tell us that a very high rate of IT projects will fail to deliver on one or more aspect.

On average, only around a third of projects are delivered on time, in scope and without budget overrun. Data Insight initiatives are no different. As data analysis solutions become more and more important to organisations if they want to stay competitive, manage processes and improve operations, the drive for these projects to be successful is on a steep rise.

In this 4-part blog series, we look at some of the common reasons data projects fail and the key underlying solutions that can help businesses improve project success rates.

Reason 1 – Outcome Alignment. What does the future hold?

The first and most important part of any data analytics project is to map out its real purpose and create alignment with the business strategy.

Organisations are often presented with requests for such solutions accompanied by the case “we need to bring our data together to create more value” or “this will solve the data transformation problems we currently have”. However, these reasons don’t address the true benefits that could be realised and this makes return on investment (ROI) measurement very difficult.

You’re about to allocate valuable time, resources and investment into your next solution, so in order to deliver a fit for purpose solution and measure ROI you should always begin at the end. This means mapping out what improves in your organisation once your project is delivered. Alongside this, do these improvements align to your overarching business strategy, goals and objectives?

A common error is to confuse the features and benefits of a solution with the outcomes delivered through implementation or its use.

One such example of this scenario is where businesses believe procuring a model toolset is an outcome. In the world of analytics, standing still is no longer sustainable and businesses must continually evolve with the ever-changing technology landscape. By recognising that the outcome from the analytics project is to maximise the value that can be derived from data assets, the roadmap is set for a solution to be sought. This may involve the use of modern data tools, a strengthening of the data governance or could be a change in the approach to how data is utilised.

The following represents an example of a well-constructed outcome:

Feature: Embedded analytics in selected solution
Benefit: Users are able to easily analyse data and generate insight
Outcome: Company saves 15% in costs from identifying operational inefficiencies

By establishing the desired outcomes before undertaking a project, you can better manage expectations and are more likely to deliver a solution that drives tangible, positive improvements and experiences.

Risk

Without aligning the outcomes of a data project to your business goals and objectives (as well as your IT strategy), you run the risk of failing to deliver tangible improvements. When ROI is evaluated at a later date, if there are no measurable improvements, it can create challenges when seeking approval of future projects.

Reward

Proposing a solution mapped to outcomes that align to your business goals creates a direct correlation between your project and a positive impact. By taking this approach you build better relationships between IT departments and senior stakeholders, as well as ensuring everything you do is continually helping your organisation. This is a virtuous circle, which generates an appetite for continual improvement through the use of data insight.

In order to put data at the heart of a business, it must be used to deliver outcomes that shape, develop and advance the business in all areas.

Our team of experts work with organisations across the UK running workshops with stakeholders to help align solutions with clear business outcomes. Find out more about our data discovery p rocess.

In part 2 of this series, we look at estimates and how to build a well-developed business case to secure investment for your project.

Lessons Learned: Three ways to deal with your digital innovation challenges

Posted on: 11 August 2021

While all our clients are different, they often use similar tactics to help them overcome challenges and innovate. Here’s what we’ve learned.

If the past year has taught us anything, it’s that digital transformation isn’t just nice to have. It’s essential to create innovative experiences that help you react to, and proactively anticipate, changing customer demands.

But whatever industry you’re in, digital transformation projects can be complex. And without the right ongoing, expert support, they can be difficult to execute.

Over decades helping our clients achieve their digital ambitions, we’ve discovered some key tactics that have been successful in helping them overcome their biggest challenges.

Here are the three most important – and you can start using them straightaway.

#1 – Respond quickly when customer demands change

Failure to adapt to changing market conditions can potentially mean you lose out to more agile competitors, which in turn means you miss out on key revenue opportunities.

Customer demands are at the heart of most changing industry trends. Particularly in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, there’s never been a better time to put your customers at the centre of your digital strategy.

One way to achieve this is by introducing new and innovative digital services that help improve the customer experience.

We helped Govia Thameslink to do just that. We worked closely to design and deploy a live passenger counting system that delivers train capacity information to customers in real time – improving passenger experience and reducing station dwell times.

As well as listening to your customers, it’s important you have the ability to scale on demand to adapt to new challenges. Our major retail clients like Argos and Waitrose & Partners know this better than most.

The ability to scale digital systems quickly helped both companies navigate the seismic shift from physical stores to online during the UK’s nationwide lockdown in 2020 – coupled with unpredictable disruption following Brexit – and keep their customers satisfied across any channel.

#2 – Be proactive, not reactive

Change isn’t always easy, particularly when your current strategy can appear to be working. But in reality, you could be fostering unnecessary complexity in your organisation.

Take manual processes for example.

One of our public transport clients realised that its managers, who had responsibility for its public areas, were spending so much time recording passenger footfall using pen and paper, they had little time left to carry out their basic duties.

It’s why we worked with our client to create an app that helped eliminate these manual processes. It not only made reporting far more efficient, but it also provides deep insights which now influence space and building designs – something that would have been impossible before.

By identifying a problem and taking proactive action, our client was able to unlock new efficiency gains and insights that help it better anticipate customer trends.

#3 – Test and learn constantly

Due to their ability to foster innovation, test-and-learn programmes have been at the heart of many of our clients’ digital development initiatives for years. And the best part is that test-and-learn doesn’t necessarily need a huge investment in time and resources.

The truth is, an effective test-and-learn programme can begin with something as simple as an email A/B test. As long as you’re gathering data and using it to make continuous iterations, you’ll soon see the benefits.

While our work with University College London Hospitals NHS Foundations Trust (UCLH) to develop and launch its Tuberculosis symptom checker app was a significant project, the foundations for our ongoing work are simple: regular idea dialogues and feedback workshops that use direct user feedback to continually improve the platform.

Once you’re confident with test-and-learn, it’s also a good opportunity to experiment with emerging technologies such as Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning – something our client Waitrose & Partners is using to reduce food waste and save money.

Discover opportunity in your biggest challenges

Now more than ever, it’s essential to engage with customers in more innovative, digital ways. But digital transformation projects require specialist skills – from design and build to integration, operation and improvement.

It’s why choosing the right partner to help you achieve your digital ambitions – and who understands the value of 24/7/365 support from embedded teams – is critical.

CACI is that kind of partner.

Backed by decades of experience helping major organisations such as Argos, UCLH, Waitrose & Partners and Mitchells & Butlers to deliver new digital solutions (and even legacy support services), we help you get complex, large-scale technology projects delivered on time.

We offer four core services to support successful project delivery:

Specialist consulting services to scope, design and deliver digital projects
Development of data-intensive software applications
Secure and compliant cloud hosting solutions
Ongoing management and monitoring of complex software systems

Find out more about our digital solutions and discover how we can help you manage your digital challenges.

Question everything in the age of information

Posted on: 20 July 2021

Whether you describe it as currency or an asset, there’s no escaping the value of data to the financial services sector. Its an industry driven more by data than perhaps any other, making the impact of big data on these institutions hard to overestimate.

Banks hold vast amounts of customer data, from purchases and cash withdrawals, to KYC data and the sources are ever increasing when we include things like mobile payments, app data and the IoT (Internet of Things).

With all of these streams of data continuously flowing into the business, an opportunity presents itself to gain insights and act on them. Whether that action is to create an edge over the competition, improve products and services, or improve customer loyalty, each is using data to fuel business growth.

Where we’ve come from and where we’re going

Traditionally banks have held this information in siloed systems, separated by product or purpose, meaning the data could be unstructured and difficult to harvest valuable insight from.

Over the past few years we have seen improvements and investment in data collection and processing, in particular within data warehousing and business intelligence. Institutions have realised that by bringing all of this information into one place they can use it in a more effective way.

With this change, as well as changes to customer behaviours, industry standards and regulatory requirements, a new challenge presents itself: Data Governance.

“Digital Transformation” – once simply the buzzword of the week, has proven to be anything but that. It’s now a priority on the agenda for almost all financial services institutions so they are able to meet customer expectations and compete alongside the small but successful fintech companies.

In order to be successful in Digital Transformation and start to exploit data assets, good data governance is non-negotiable. Businesses want to take advantage of new technologies such as machine learning and AI, which each depend on clean, quality data.

Getting data-governance right has an impact across the whole organisation, from being able to leverage market opportunities at a management level, to finance reports being consistent and accurate, to understand the customer and market to them more effectively, and of course meeting the regulation requirements for compliance and legal teams.

Plain and simple – good data governance makes everything better.

What does successful data governance look like?

In building a data governance strategy, there are four pillars to consider that will go a long way towards a successful program, allowing for better use and management of technologies such as cloud, machine learning and AI.

The four pillars are:

Collaboration
Speed
Data Privacy and Protection
Scale

Now we know what they are, let’s look at these pillars in slightly more detail.

Collaboration

When it comes to data governance, communication is key, without which no one knows what best practice looks like, what workflows, infrastructure and architecture are in place and no one would understand the goals of the project.

Keeping everything in one place, that single shared resource (if there’s a benefit to your data in one place, take the same approach to your documentation), helps facilitate collaboration across all stakeholders involved in a data governance project.

This will support aspects of your project such as audit trails, processes, guidance and project ownership.

Speed

Any IT professional or project manager will tell you, one critical aspect on any project is momentum. As soon as things start to slow down, you can hear the sighs coming from the projects team as they try to keep everyone moving.

In order to implement a successful data governance program, organisations need to be agile and adaptable, otherwise the project risks losing the efficiency benefit that data governance is there to facilitate.

Making use of AI and automating processes can take a lot of the manual tasks away from your teams’ workload and allow them to focus on more high-value, insight driven efforts.

Data protection and privacy

Cybersecurity is level 1 priority, security breaches are at an all time high and customer demand for control of their data (as well as trust in the organisation that hold it) are all pressing concerns for financial institutions.

Part of successful data governance is being able to protect data wherever it is and easily identify what protection sensitive data should have, so that your safeguards and processes meet the expectations of both customers and regulators.

Scale

We mentioned agile in relation to keeping momentum on projects, and it is applicable here too.

Often organisations will start a small data governance project and scale up as required in order to meet digital transformation goals and roll out the program across the whole enterprise.

Being able to take advantage of modular systems means that when you’re trying to get investment buy from management for data governance projects, you can also start small with the technology you use and grow with demand.

What next?

As data continues to pour into every financial services institution daily, being able to deliver on successful data governance is moving from a desirable “we’ll do it next financial year” to a key priority for businesses.

Customers are increasingly looking for the “best of breed” across all purchases, and banking and finance are no exception. Companies must implement a data governance program that can support them in this changing landscape, or risk getting left in the dust of competitors.

CACI work with institutions across financial services to help build and implement data governance and other data technology solutions. Click here to find out how we could help your business.

Identifying, assessing & mitigating the impact of child trauma

Posted on: 16 July 2021

The concept of child trauma is a fluid one. There are the obvious examples that we can think of, those that social services and professionals deal with on a day-to-basis. Then there are the more intangible experiences of trauma, such as long-term neglect, structural and institutional trauma. The responses to behaviour by the professionals involved, be they teachers, youth offending teams or care workers, play a crucial role in the outcomes of these children. How can we work with conflict and challenge to join often disparate parts of our responses to create a roadmap to improved outcomes for all children?

CACI recently hosted an event exploring this topic. We were joined by a panel of domain experts: Alex Chard, director at YCTS; Shaun Brown, programme director at The Difference; Sonia Blandford, CEO at Achievement for All and; Marius Frank, strategic lead for E-learning development and youth justice at Achievement for All. The event was hosted by our Children & Young Person’s strategic director, Marc Radley.

How can we relate to children who have suffered lifetime trauma who find it hard to recover and build resilience?

“Understanding the history of these children is the responsibility of everyone concerned with their story,” says Alex. “We have to understand every child in youth offending services. At the moment we tend to ‘snapshot’ risk and tend to the most recent events. We need to look back further. We also need to assume that all children in the criminal justice system have suffered trauma. Gaining an understanding of early childhood abuse, especially something as corrosive as neglect, is a vital step in establishing relationships with these young people and building up their resilience.”

In what way do our system responses help or hinder recovery?

This was identified as an area for improvement by our panel. “There are so many layers in the systems that we operate and we tend to focus on what we know and understand,” explains Sonia. “These need to be an overarching view of every child; instead we have simplified information in silos. System responses, therefore, are a hindrance and can even exacerbate the difficulties for the child. We need to find ways to share our knowledge across the board and in order to learn and improve, we need to eliminate unhelpful routes and make things simple. At the moment there are too many layers.”

“Chronology and understanding of vulnerable children is hindered by misplaced fear of protecting privacy,” says Shaun. “Where access to past information is restricted, we can only see current information and there is no context. Understanding gets lost and many young people are left continually restarting their journeys.”

There is also the educational aspect in all of this, away from youth justice teams. “Assessment has failure built into it and this is a form of institutional trauma,” explains Sonia. “A lot of these children are always failing exams and tests and being told they’re bottom of the pile.”

“For some 14- and 15-year olds the first time they are diagnosed with severe educational disabilities is at screening by a youth offending team,” says Marius. “Why? Because of exclusions. This is driven by high stakes assessments and a results driven system.”

CACI is approved on the NHS England Health System Support Framework (HSSF)

Posted on: 14 July 2021

CACI has been listed to provide workforce deployment solutions for eRostering, job planning and temporary staffing software solutions by NHS England

We are delighted to announce that CACI’s Cygnum workforce management software has been listed as an approved solution on the Health Systems Support Framework (HSSF). Operated by NHS England, the HSSF is a group of associated procurement frameworks to support delivery of integrated care, digitisation of the NHS and scaling of innovation by providing a marketplace of approved providers for NHS bodies to work with.

The addition of new workforce deployment service lines focus on eRostering, job planning and temporary staffing solutions. This will help the NHS become a truly modern employer by enabling evidence-based change and utilising best practice in workforce management, deployment and development of staff. The aim is that all workforce systems purchased and used by NHS organisations will meet national data and interoperability standards.

We’re delighted that CACI has been listed as an approved supplier on this framework,” says, Ollie Watson, Business Development Director at CACI. “Our Cygnum workforce management solution meets all the service line requirements as well as offering a step change with its patient demand-based approach and resultant workforce scheduling functionality.

We’re excited to show just how much potential there is to innovate within this area.

CACI’s Cygnum workforce management software is utilised by a number of public and third sector care organisations to help optimise and automate service delivery and support excellent patient care.

eRostering is core functionality in Cygnum, with the software allowing resources to be intelligently mapped to demand. Demand can be driven by patient needs, be this task-based from a patient care plan, or based on physical occupancy such as wards and rooms.

Cygnum ensures job plans are in place by recording assessments, training and competencies effectively and considering these against patient pathway demand and organisational needs.

Cygnum also meets the requirements of temporary staffing, ensuring an efficient and controlled process from first application, recording of training and competency, to staff rostering and self-management.

For more information on Cygnum, please click here.

CACI achieves ISO 20000 accreditation

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As part of CACI’s ongoing efforts to enhance our service delivery to our customers, we’re delighted to announce that we have achieved the ISO 20000 service management certification. Our team has worked incredibly hard to align our practices with those outlined by ITIL, and the awarding of this certification is reward for all that hard work.

The ISO 20000 certification sits alongside our ISO 9001, 14001 and 27001 certifications and demonstrates CACI’s commitment to delivering the best possible service and ongoing support to our customers. To achieve the ISO 20000 standard, we have streamlined our processes and procedures and improved the ways we manage customer service. For example, we now use dashboards to monitor customer reviews and track feedback and internal improvement against these.

I’m delighted that we have been awarded the ISO 20000 certification,” says Matt Cooper, Senior Vice President at CACI. “It provides a further layer of assurance to our customers and inspires increased confidence in our solutions. Furthermore, it highlights the robust data security controls that we have in place, demonstrating the quality of, and ongoing commitment to, our products and services and best practices that we apply as a company.

CACI becomes a member of the RSSB

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CACI is delighted to confirm that it has been approved as a member of the RSSB (Rail Safety and Standards Board) as it seeks to strengthen its position as a 360-degree provider of products and services to the UK’s rail industry.

RSSB’s vision of a better, safer railway for everyone is shared by CACI. Via its multitude of products and services, CACI is strongly positioned to support the entire UK rail network in delivering this vision.

CACI provides products and services across the whole rail network to help deliver improvements in infrastructure management, optimise operational resilience and enhance the overall customer experience. Our portfolio of services includes understanding passenger numbers and putting in place solutions to facilitate passengers’ safe return to rail post-Covid, to understanding and driving efficiencies across the workforce employed to operate and maintain the network. CACI also supports operators through specialist consultancy, bespoke systems development and solution migration to aid operational efficiency.

We’re delighted to welcome CACI aboard as a member of RSSB.” says Chris Leech, Membership Development Manager UK + International at RSSB. “CACI’s products and services have lots to offer our vision of a better, safer railway in the UK and we’re excited to see what difference it can make to our industry. Efficiency, safety protocols and operational insight of services have been under the spotlight in recent years, so we welcome any technology provider that can help underpin improvements in our industry.

We’re delighted to have been approved a member of RSSB,” says Matt Cooper, senior vice president at CACI. “We firmly believe that our range of products and services are a great fit for the UK’s rail network. The rail industry, like everyone else, has been impacted by Covid, so there has never been a greater need to understand customer demand for rail services. Operational insight is vital, both to understand passenger journeys and to understand the challenges faced by those working on our rail network. By driving operational insight, we firmly believe that we can support the rail industry in delivering a better, safer railway for everyone.

Contactless Pubs: 4 Things We Learned Building Mitchells & Butlers’ Order-At-Table App

Posted on: 13 July 2021

Even before social distancing changed the hospitality industry, some businesses like Mitchells & Butlers were already responding to customer demands for quicker and easier ordering.

For example, an order-at-table app – enabling customers to choose and pay for their food and beverages without leaving their table – is an essential part of the new, contactless pub experience. Done well, it’s also convenient for the customer who no longer has to wait for service or queue at a bar. It’s great for the pub too – helping to improve efficiency and boost revenue.

Since 2017, we’ve been working with Mitchells & Butlers to develop, integrate, and refine an order-at-table app which is now available in five of their leading brands – O’Neill’s, All Bar One, Ember Inns, High Street, and Sizzling Pubs, making up around 25% of the company’s near 1,700 venues.

In that time, we’ve learnt important lessons about what makes a great at-table app that keeps customers coming back for more. So if you’re in the process of adapting your own hospitality experience to make it more contactless, here are four key elements to bear in mind.

1. REAL-TIME STOCK CONTROL INTEGRATION IS ESSENTIAL

Picture this: you’ve ordered food at a bar, only to be told a few minutes later that your choice isn’t available today. And then, under pressure, you choose something else which isn’t quite what you wanted. It’s frustrating to say the least. And while the bar tender could have told you your meal was out of stock at the time, they just didn’t have access to that information in the moment.

The same goes for an at-table ordering app. Without real time stock information, you risk frustrating and disappointing your customers, and creating unnecessary workload.

That’s why Mitchells & Butlers prioritised integrating its order-at-table app with the latest point of sale and stock control data to maintain an accurate menu that self-edits based on real-time product availability.

It also pays to keep out-of-stock items on the app menu – either crossed or blocked out – so your customers can still see what’s normally available to give them inspiration for next time.

2. PUT THE CUSTOMER IN CONTROL

Customers are leading increasingly busy lives, so offering the same choice and flexibility that they’d expect from face-to-face bar staff can be a significant competitive differentiator.

By giving customers more options at each stage of the ordering process, you can give them greater flexibility.

For example, a customer may have had their starter and main course, but now wants to take their dessert home. By offering the option to change part of their order at any stage, you’re giving them more options.

This helps to ensure the customer goes away happy, having had the experience they really want. And because you’ve made ordering that much easier, it can even increase your average transaction value.

3. SIMPLICITY IS THE KEY TO GREAT USER EXPERIENCE

When thinking about your app’s customer journey – including how it looks and feels – the process should be no less convenient than choosing from a physical menu and relaying their order to a server.

So, while it’s important to give your customers a wide range of options at each stage, your user journey should be concise, with the ability to select products and pay for an order in as few steps as possible – without the risk of payment errors or double charges.

Also, bear in mind that journey starts before they even download your app. It needs to be easy to find and recognise in their app store, and enable them to get started quickly.

It’s this kind of thinking that refined each of the Mitchells & Butlers brand app s, leading to significantly higher user uptake.

4. THE RIGHT TECHNOLOGY PARTNER CAN MAKE ALL THE DIFFERENCE

Delivering a great digital experience that works for both you and your customers relies on having the right technology, and choosing a partner that’s got experience creating customer-centric apps.

It’s important to look for a partner that understands your ethos and exactly what you’re trying to achieve – and one with a team that can work with your own IT staff to help ensure seamless back-end integrations and a clear project roadmap.

PUTTING THE CUSTOMER FIRST BENEFITS EVERYONE

Bringing technology like order-at-table apps into a pub environment shouldn’t just be seen as a solution to recent social distancing changes. Rather, it’s an opportunity to take a more customer-centric approach to digital transformation; start from the experience your customer wants, and build from there.

That includes listening and learning to what your customers are saying after you’ve launched. It’s important to test and learn from the results – making continual iterations as you go to refine and improve the experience.

If you’d like to find out more about our work with Mitchells & Butlers – or if you’d like to talk more about getting the most from an at-table ordering app – get in touch with our team of experts today.