About the FSA

The Food Standards Agency (FSA) is an independent government department that works across England, Wales and Northern Ireland to protect public health by maintaining food safety and hygiene standards. Through a rigorous, scientific approach, the FSA ensures consumers across the UK can trust the food they eat is both safe and correctly labelled.

The environment in which we operate and the connectivity we need is rapidly evolving. Working with the Exponential-e team, we've valued their expertise in being able to migrate us from one environment to another and the innovation that they've been able to bring to that changing landscape.

Tim Lewis, Solutions Architect, Food Standards Agency

Solution 

The resulting migration involved close collaboration and coordination with other participants in the Evolve IT programme, particularly the LAN and service desk providers, in order to minimise service disruption and ensure a successful integration with the existing infrastructure. This involved multiple weekly or daily calls - covering everything from product management to solution design - which not only maintained open channels of communication, but also helped drive better customer relations - a model that continues to this day.

The resulting deployment boosted connectivity at plant sites across the UK, with a new network infrastructure that connects back to the FSA's corporate network. Secured by a centralised firewall, the network consists of the FSA's five main office sites with fibre WAN, plus all 173 plant sites. Exponential-e also took ownership of the FSA's 173 PSTN lines, in order to manage its entire plant estate. Other key elements were a resilient, high-performance centralised internet, colocation based in Enfield and SSL VPN remote access to the FSA's corporate network for 1,200 end users. Later, these new channels for remote working proved invaluable in allowing the FSA to respond quickly to the COVID-19 pandemic.

In addition to a 24 / 7 x 365 service desk, Exponential-e also provided a dedicated account director and service manager, who would provide tailored reporting at all meetings and play an active part in identifying and acting on new opportunities. Taking a proactive, customer-focused approach to resolving service issues has allowed Exponential-e to actively support the FSA's 'Evergreen' initiative, utilising a strategic renewal plan, where savings from unused ADSL lines are used to upgrade to FTTC, which was later extended to all FSA sites.

This hands-on support was further enhanced with centralised monitoring, utilising the Insight Advanced and Insight for Broadband solutions, which improved operational efficiency and helped drive more data-driven decision making, leading to tangible cost savings and a move towards 'internet first' strategies.

This level of agility and scalability was only achieved by developing close partnerships between the FSA, Exponential-e and other Evolve IT participants, which have continued developing since the point of inception, building on a strong, scalable foundation to support ongoing growth and deliver new innovations on a regular basis.

When your organisation is geographically spread, robust connectivity is a vital strategic asset to underpin effective remote working and access. In these situations, a good end-user experience is key, because people can't understand why such a simple thing should be so hard. The network we've implemented with the FSA is designed to create a better and more productive working environment and provide the stable platform required to meet compliance and regulation timeframes.

David Lozdan, Head of Public Sector Sales, Exponential-e

To ensure food standards and safety, it's vital for us to provide a secure, reliable communications platform with a good user experience for our team of inspectors. This has been especially true during COVID-19 where the ability to act and communicate swiftly and effectively has been essential to keeping the food supply lines safe and operational.

Tim Lewis, Solutions Architect, Food Standards Agency

 Challenges

The  Customer

The customer is a central governing body that utilises the growing volumes of data generated across multiple channels to optimise the delivery of critical services across the UK, while ensuring the highest standards of security and compliance are maintained at all times.

The Challenge

Key considerations included:

• A resilient, scalable multichannel environment - encompassing voice, email, SMS, webchat, and all major social media platforms, that would maximise opportunities for engagement with citizens.
• The ability to configure all elements of the interface to staff's requirements, making it as efficient and user-friendly as possible, with clearly defined supervisory levels.
• Robust cyber security and governance inherent in the design, ensuring data protection policies would be consistently applied and all compliance obligations met, while optimising the accessibility, quality, and utility of all data.
• Granular and broad visibility across the entire solution, allowing administrators to tailor the solution within predetermined parameters, allowing tools and processes to be continually refined in response to feedback.
• Bespoke dashboards and reporting, allowing analysts to effortlessly access key metrics and monitor every step of the citizen journey in real-time.
• Seamless integration with existing platforms, with scope to integrate further tools in the future.

Solution 

In the run up to 'go live', the Exponential-e's project team worked closely with the customer's own teams to ensure agents were ready to adopt the new technology. Following extensive training, agents were able to make full use of the new platform on the same morning the legacy telephony system was switched off, without any disruption to live services. The already strong relationship between teams at both companies, established during previous complex deployments, proved invaluable here, with close communication and collaboration at every stage laying the foundation for the project's eventual success.

As all interactions were now taking place through a single, fully integrated platform, the consistent application of skills-based routing ensured citizens were put in touch with the appropriate agent as quickly as possible, with time on hold kept to the absolute minimum. In addition to optimising the path to successful resolutions, this also meant that analysts could access all data about each citizen's journey through a centralised knowledge base, regardless of the number of channels involved. A combination of real-time analytics and automated satisfaction surveys was utilised to measure the quality of each interaction.

To ensure this data could be used to its fullest potential, the customer was able to create bespoke dashboards for a range of metrics, including the channels and menus enquiries were received through, wait times, the agent who handled each, whether the call needed to be transferred, and the final time to resolution - all updated every fifteen seconds. This way, both analysts and supervisors could access a wealth of information on both agent performance and citizens' overall experiences, without needing to consolidate information from multiple channels and records, as had previously been the case.

With this critical information automatically collated in an actionable form and the ability to automatically apply service changes through the dashboards, the new contact centre enabled true data-driven decision making at all levels, so tools and processes could be constantly refined and, ultimately, the highest levels of service quality and availability maintained.

As an early adopter of hybrid working, the new contact centre only strengthened the customer's capabilities in this regard, granting supervisors maximum flexibility in terms of how agents were deployed, without compromising data security, call quality, or their ability to collaborate with their colleagues whenever necessary.

The new contact centre is constantly evolving, as the high volumes of data gathered during each interaction reveals new opportunities for service enhancements. Administrators can continue refining their tools and processes via their dashboards, with support available from their Exponential-e account team and a 24 / 7, UK-based support desk, whenever it is required.

All of this demonstrates how the ever-growing volumes of data generated across multiple channels can be used to improve wellbeing across the UK, and the potentially transformative power of technology when utilised in service of the public good.