The Arcus Angle - Issue 1

ISSUE 1
NOVEMBER 2018

Denis Kaminskiy
CEO & Co-Founder
Welcome!
Welcome to the first Arcus quarterly newsletter, intended to give you an update
on the company, projects and solutions that we are working on and to provide
you with information on the various types of customer projects we deliver as
well as putting faces to a number of our team.
In May this year we were delighted to announce a £3m investment by YFM
Partners, a specialist Private Equity Fund Manager to fund our continuing
growth. This completes 2018 fund raising by Arcus to a total of £5M - money
that will be used for growth and improvement in our products and services. We
had an incredible interest in our business, and no shortage of very interesting
offers of support.
Since we were established in 2009 we have experienced rapid growth through
the design and delivery of disruptive cloud-based technology solutions that
enable local authorities and other government bodies (the public sector) to
transform and improve their services. Following this investment Arcus are
making a number of changes in structures, some of which are detailed inside
this newsletter.
I hope that you enjoy reading this newsletter and find it useful. If you have any
feedback please contact our Marketing Manager Kate Warboys:
kate.warboys@arcusglobal.com

Contents
1
2-3
5-7
8-9
10
11
12-13
14-15
16
17
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Arcus Global as one of Britain’s fastest-growing
tech companies
Case Study - Rutland County Council
Green Waste Service
The Birth of Circular Data
Arcus Answer - The future of AI-powered customer service?
Internal Changes Update
Product and Customer Fulfilment Updates
Meet the Team
Salesforce Winter ‘19 Release
Arcus sees success at the Computing Cloud Excellence
Awards
Arcus User Group
Final thought
‘The Sunday Times recognises Arcus Global
as one of Britain’s fastest-growing
tech companies.’
The annual Sunday Times’ Tech Track 100 league, lists Arcus Global as 56
of Britain’s fastest-growing private technology companies, one of only five
companies from the tech hub of Cambridge.
The league ranks these fast- growing private technology, media and telecoms
companies by their average annual sales growth over their latest three
financial years and Arcus Global has achieved 75.57% growth. Sales grew
to £13.1m last financial year securing a £3m investment from YFM Equity
Partners.
Denis Kaminskiy, CEO says:
“We are all thrilled with being recognised on this
prestigious listing. It certainly has been a busy and an
exciting time for us as we continue to accelerate. Our
rapid growth is as a result of the desperate need by local
authorities to embrace high quality, end-to-end digital
services for citizens while continuing to save. As a disruptor
and challenger in this traditional market we are delivering
on their ambition”
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Results Story
• Within 6 weeks over 7,000
households have signed
up for the service
(of a total of 16,947)
Case Study:
Green Waste Service
• 70% signed up for the
service online
• 70% chose to pay via
direct debit
Business Challenge
Unlike neighbouring councils, the Rutland Green Waste Service was a free
service to residents. However, due to the increasing financial pressures,
Rutland CC could not continue to subsidise these collections in order to
make them free of charge. In common with other public sector organisations,
Rutland has falling revenues whilst facing increasing demands on its services
and cost efficiencies are essential across all areas of the council.
In order to make the process as simple as possible for residents, Rutland CC
contracted with Arcus Global to deliver an innovative online digital solution
whilst ensuring staff efficiencies were met.
Transformation Story
Arcus Global worked with Rutland CC to design and build the new online
service utilising the functionality of the Salesforce platform to ensure that
end to end processes were as efficient as possible. The solution was designed
to be as easy as possible for residents to use and similar to more traditional
commercial online services. Arcus Global introduced Rutland to a number
of solutions; Asperato, Braintree Payments and GoCardless, to ensure the
end user experience met expectations and delivered Rutland an online
service that users wanted to use and allowed for recurring payments and
direct debits to be set up at the same time as registering for the service. To
help introduce the paid for service, Rutland had a dedicated team of staff to
encourage subscriptions and sign up over a six week period.
Andy Nix, Head of IT and Customer Services Rutland County
Council says:
We are delighted with the work that Arcus did for us; they
were constantly testing and refining to make sure that
the project delivered the right solution for us, including
suggesting suitable payment solutions. They delivered on
time against a challenging timescale.
Prior to our work with Arcus we had no baseline statistics
on customer behaviour. So we were delighted to see the
appetite of our residents to engage with us online. We
are confident that this will result in us undertaking more
digital projects.
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Richard Godfrey
ACCOUNT DIRECTOR
Local Government
The Birth of Circular Data
Ok so there is already such a thing as circular data, but it’s very different to
the concept I’m going to talk about here.
There has been much written and lots of money spent over the years about
the Circular Economy with many countries, cities and towns across the world
looking at supporting the principles of its concept. In 2015 Peterborough
won the World’s Smartest City award largely due to its work in this area.
The Ellen MacArthur Foundation, whose mission is to accelerate the transition
to a circular economy, states that there are three key principles to consider:
• Design out waste and pollution
• Keep products and materials in use
• Regenerate natural systems
What’s clear though is that you can apply the same principles and thinking
to data and how it is used across cities, towns, businesses and public services
with regards to transforming services, by replacing some key words with the
word ‘data’.
The Foundation also states that ‘Companies need to build core competencies
in circular design to facilitate product reuse, recycling and cascading’. Again
the word product can be easily replaced with the
word data.
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Each of the three principles above are still valid and I will explain each of
these in more detail:
Design out waste and pollution
Many key systems are standalone and not designed to share data across
services but through implementing a platform approach to both services
and systems this data can be used more widely throughout the organisation,
(inline with DPA principles) Siloed data that is used once and then ‘wasted’
can be designed out.
This can be looked at in various guises such as single view of the customer
or household through to using the data you hold in more ways than you
currently do but also re-imagining services so that waste and lost effort
are removed from the process and helping move to a data driven decision
making model.
Where possible data created by one system or service should be used to
improve all the services you deliver and not ‘lost’. For pollution from a data
perspective we should be thinking about removing duplicate records and
poor data elements.
Keep data in use
As per the above point, keeping data in use is vital to achieving service
improvements. I’ve worked with numerous public sector services where data
is used by one team and not another; when it could clearly play a mutually
beneficial role. Services need to learn and understand where ‘external’ data
can be used to improve their services.
By external data we mean any data not generated by the service itself. In the
same way that a circular economy promotes the use of one company’s ‘waste’
to be another’s benefit; to keep materials and products in use, here we are
keeping data in use. (Marmite probably being the world’s best example of
this - and yes I love it).
Regenerate natural systems
We can look at this principle from a number of angles when relating it to
data. For a pure natural system we could be looking at the Internet of Things
(or the internet of data, as the data is the key not the ‘thing’ collecting it)
which could look at everything from air and water quality (improving nature)
through to a Social System, whereby transforming social care with IOT can
both improve the lives of the vulnerable to look after themselves, to enabling
a family to be more in control of the family member’s care (and therefore
improving the most natural of systems of family looking after family) which
can now both be achieved.
I’m passionate about data and its role in transforming services. The platform
approach to Local Government services not only helps in transforming
individual services but brings those services together to give that single view
of the customer across multiple services.
I’m also passionate about how better use of the data can improve services, a
subject that I’ve presented to conferences previously, and how understanding
the data you hold and being able to interrogate it in a meaningful and visual
manner can show previously unseen patterns and anomalies.
It’s likely that as companies and services start to understand the concept of
‘Circular Data’ that it will naturally spawn a circular data economy as well as
playing a leading part in a helping to deliver the more conventional circular
economy.
The more that we all do to move towards both a circular economy and a
circular data model then the better the services that can be delivered and
the better economic and environmental health of our cities and countries
can be achieved. With a lot of funding and effort being aimed at the Circular
Economy,
I think it’s time the same levels should be applied to Circular Data taking the
current Economic principles and frameworks and re-aligning them to better
use of data.
With machine learning, the machines are reliant on an ever increasing
amount of good data to refine the responses and answers given. Arcus
Answer which is a contact centre solution utilising the AWS Lex solution is a
good example of this. All AI solutions can only ever be as good as the data
they are utilising and there needs to be a constant feed.
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Tim Lancaster
AWS PRACTICE DIRECTOR
Arcus Answer:
The future of AI-powered customer service?
Arcus Answer is more like talking to Amazon Echo (Alexa) than calling an
automated service. Hold music is replaced by an instant answer; the service
deals equitably with angry citizens and can be relied on to give the same
answers to the same questions. If linked to back-end CRM systems, these
services can also process whole transactions, such as booking appointments,
issuing parking permits or recording a missed bin collection.
Services are not limited to inbound calls. Councils are starting to consider
using Arcus Answer to call hostels and care homes to find available beds, a
daily task that takes an individual time, but which can be done much faster
by AI that rings every hostel concurrently.
The answers can be managed via an online database.
Artificial intelligence (AI) has become a major talking point and how
the technology will transform how we communicate to deliver a faster,
immediate and cost-effective service.
What if we could speak to Alexa (Amazon Echo) rather than an automated
service?
In fact, this is what NHS Business Services Authority (BSA), providers of the
European health insurance cards, are currently trialling at the moment. They
are piloting Arcus Answer which is very similar to Alexa and have found that
the technology can answer up to 40% of the calls. The average cost of a call
in a UK contact centre is nearly £4, but the cost of an Arcus Answer service is
less than £1 which means massive savings.
So why does this matter to local authorities?
Local authorities have to offer good customer service on everything from
parking and housing to recycling, waste services and severe weather
response. As a result, every local authority has at least one call centre.
Expensive to set up and run, staff turnover is often high. Nor are websites
the solution; digital transactions often limited to filling out a form, residents
who need help often come from groups that don’t have good access to the
internet or are not comfortable using online.
Outbound calling is also useful in emergency situations such as flooding
where a service can look up which postcodes are affected, call residents
individually, find out what help they need or the emergency services at any
time of the day or night.
In emergencies, AI can free up budget to spend on human care, for example
by calling to arrange home visits.
Often the promise of new technology is lost in the pain of implementation,
yet the NHS pilot took just four weeks.
Local authorities are under constant scrutiny to deliver good customer service
so due to long-term cost savings, are turning to Arcus Answer as they realise
the benefits to a more streamlined, efficient approach. Simple queries can
now be resolved immediately, i.e., the system can automatically order you a
waste bin directly to your door, rather than being on hold for what seems an
eternity to speak to an advisor for the very same thing. More complex queries
can then be routed to the advisor and valuable resource can be utilised
correctly.
For more information on Arcus Answer, please visit:
https://www.arcusglobal.com/arcus-answer
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Peter Dewsbury
CHIEF OPERATING OFFICER
Internal Changes Update
Product and Customer
Fulfilment Updates
We are always looking for ways in which we can better align our products
and services to customer requirements. One of the most consistent pieces of
feedback over the past few months has been the desire for a quick and easy
‘off the shelf’ option for implementing our products - offering predictability
and certainty as well as innovation.
We agree with our customers that this is particularly important as we work
to quickly grow our presence in local government. To better align our teams
to this delivery model we have made some internal changes that will benefit
new and existing customers alike.
Kim Kees will move to the new Customer Fulfilment
Director role with responsibility for delivering the Arcus
‘Place’ products. Kim has been with Arcus for 3 years
and previously worked in local government and at
Civica and Northgate. She will be leading the creation
and refinement of more focused implementation
methodologies that support customers as they migrate
systems and then leverage Arcus technology to transform services.
Richard Godfrey - will move to a newly created role of Account Director
- Local Government. Richard has been with Arcus for over two years and
was previously Assistant Director, Digital Peterborough at Peterborough
City Council. Richard will be applying his wealth of knowledge to helping
customers make the most of their technology investment with Arcus.
Douglas Guthrie will be Head of Platform Projects and lead a team of
Salesforce specialists to deliver CRM implementations and one off projects.
Doug has been at Arcus for over 6 years and has led many of our highest
profile Salesforce deployments.
I hope you find these changes to be positive to your experience of working
with Arcus and look forward to hearing your feedback as the reshaped teams
bed in.
As many of you will know, we have been working hard to improve our Built
Environment application over the last 9 months. The BE5 build is now
nearing completion with initial feedback from customers being extremely
positive.
As the majority of the functions to enable an out of the box deployment are
complete, we have commenced roll out to the first 3 customers.
The implementation of BE5 will be very different to that adopted previously,
and aligns with the out-of-the-box capability our customers have been
asking for. This will mean that we can get customers live much quicker, and
changes the emphasis from an Agile to Waterfall delivery. It will be a more
familiar process to you as we show you how to configure the standard system
and the configuration limitations and you make those changes to ensure
that you can manage it going forward. Part of the work has been to add
the Process Engine, developed for our Regulatory Services solution, which
will allow you to further automate your solutions without needing coding
knowledge.
A schedule to roll-out the solution to all customers is currently being
developed.
Regulatory Services implementations continue, and again, taking feedback
from our customers, we have consolidated the work carried out at those
customers to allow us to deploy out-of-the box processes for Regulatory
functions. Our next step is to develop tools to speed up the deployment of
the standard processes, so that we can concentrate implementation effort
on showing customers how to tweak the processes to meet their own needs.
We are also carrying out a gap analysis and prioritisation exercise to identify
any missing processes to be added.
As we increase the Product and Customer Fulfilment teams, we will be
adding standard CRM and DSH configurations to help us speed up our
Digital Transformation deliveries.
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Stephen Monks
ENTERPRISE APPLICATION SUPPORT MANAGER
Steve has 30+ years of experience working in IT and Software
support service environments and joined Arcus Global
in 2012.
Stephen manages a team of 3rd line Support Developers
who, working closely with the Service Desk, provide
‘Go Live’ aftercare with additional and deeper technical
support across multiple spectrums for raised incidents and
minor new feature requests.
Stephen also manages the aftercare Release Management process which will
provide the necessary service upgrades at regular intervals.
Meet the Team
Support and Enterprise
Welcome to the front face of communication at Arcus Global once you have
had the Go Live from your Project Manager. The support help we provide
you is a formation of two layers: Support receive your incidents in the form of
tickets via the Support Analyst’s for the 1st line at Arcus Global assessment;
where tickets need further technical assistance then the Enterprise team
become involved. Both Support Team and Enterprise Team (named after
Starship Enterprise) are explained in more detail below so you can see names
of whom you are likely to be talking to when we respond to your inbound
incidents and tickets.
Hollie Armstrong
SERVICE DESK MANAGER
Hollie has 20+ years working in highly focussed, time critical business streams
and joined Arcus Global in 2015, she wanted to help local Councils realise
the benefits of working in the Cloud; she wants to help them benefit from
improved business efficiencies and streamlining business processes.
Hollie works with your Arcus Global Account / Sales Manager
in advance of the migration of your account to the
Managed Services Department. Hollie’s role is to act as
conduit between you as the Customer and the Support
Desk once the new product has been delivered and
transitioned into Managed Services and the sales process
complete. She will be involved with on-site meetings to
discuss service delivery and provide you with reporting statistics.
Hollie provides the link between the Customer and Arcus Global Managed
Services Desk. She has well honed communication skills to understand
and translate customer requirements. Reporting to Hollie is Darren
Linacre, Jane Hagger and Dan Coleman. The team provide you with 1st
line analyst support for your incidents, issues and questions after you have
communicated your issues through your internal triage process, and would
then further assistance.
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Channels
LiveMessage in Lightning
Omni-Channel
Live Agent
Social Customer Service
Salesforce Winter ‘19 Release
Salesforce has recently upgraded all customers to the latest version of their
software, referred to as the Winter’19 release. As you’re aware these upgrades
are included in your licence fee to Arcus and you can now benefit from the
enhanced functionality available as part of the release.
For a full overview please click this link here to access the release details:
https://admin.salesforce.com/releaseinabox
As a brief oversight the improvements included in Winter ‘19 relate to:
Overall User Productivity & Operational Analytics
Overall User Productivity
Lightning Experience Adoption
Lightning Usage App
Display Density Settings
Mass Change Owner
Search/Share Listviews
Console
Search
Analytics - Reports & Dashboards
Drill down on reports
Edit Joined Reports (Beta)
Quick search on reports home
Folder enhancements
Chart enhancements
Service Cloud
Case Management & Agent Productivity
Case Feed Enhancements
Folders for Quick Text and Macros
Case Email enhancements
Lightning Flow for Service
Lightning Knowledge
Actions on Articles related list
Insert Anchor links in rich text fields
Quick Text in Knowledge
Auto-filter Knowledge searches on case
Use Search Layout with search results (Beta)
Apex triggers & Custom Buttons, Actions and Links
Setup enhancements
Field Service Lightning
Generate reports in any Salesforce supported language
Quickly find signed service reports
Guided actions for work orders
Managed Package updates
Dispatcher console for contractors
Color code the Gantt
Appointment enhancements
Salesforce for iOS and Android
Manage Territories on the Go
Opportunity Change owner
Set reminders on task created via Quick Action
Access the File Detail page on Mobile
Customisation
Lightning App Builder - Set component visibility based on permissions
New integrations page in Setup
Process Automation
New screen components in Flow
See approval requests assigned to your queues
Where this field is used (Pilot)
Create and edit Field Sets in Lightning
Reference Custom Metadata Types in advanced formula fields
If you would like to understand how these new features could be of use to
you and your team then please contact either:
Richard Godfrey: richard.godfrey@arcusglobal.com or if you have a live
project in progress, your Project Manager.
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Arcus sees success at the Computing
Cloud Excellence Awards
Arcus User Group
4th December @ Impact Hub Kings Cross, London
It was a huge week for Arcus Global last week at the prestigious Computing
Cloud Excellence Awards. We took home ‘Cloud Telephony Project of the
Year’ for Arcus Answer and were also involved in the ‘Best Cloud Project’ win
for NHS Business Services Authority (NHSBSA).
The public sector is changing the way they communicate with its service
users, digitising processes to gain efficiencies and offering greater levels of
accessibility 24/7 to the user.
The NHSBSA embarking on the NHS Contact Centre project is a perfect
example of this. Working with Arcus and Amazon, they have implemented
Arcus Answer which answers phone calls using artificial intelligence. However,
Arcus Answer is more like talking to Amazon Echo (Alexa) than calling an
automated service and can deal with most routine patient queries. In fact,
the technology has responded to 40 per cent of their calls and has led
to more operators being freed up for more complex cases, giving people
an increased quality of service. The NHSBSA also took home ‘Best Cloud
Analytics Project’ for good measure.
We are obviously very proud of our ‘Cloud Telephony
Project of the Year’ win too. The judges’ comments being
“great use case and great story”, proving that the public
sector can certainly compete when it comes to providing
a quality service to customers with transformative
technology.
As part of my new remit as Account Director, I’m setting up quarterly
Arcus Global User Groups. These meetings will have a focus on our existing
customers forming relationships to feel more supported in the work that you
are undertaking, whilst providing you with an opportunity to share ideas and
knowledge on the different types of projects that we are working on with
you. These meetings will be about Arcus Global and our customers in general,
not specific Product User Groups.
We would also discuss any opportunities for funding that you may want to
co-bid on and also for you to feedback on where you think some of our focus
and priorities should be going forwards and improvements we can make. We
have a very varied and wide ranging set of projects currently in progress and
I believe it would be beneficial to you all to hear from other customers and
some of our partners on this.
The first User Group will be held at the Impact Hub Kings Cross in London on
Tuesday 4th December and invites to this have been sent out. If you haven’t
received an invite and think you would benefit from this then please contact
me directly.
Going forwards, although this meeting will be facilitated by Arcus, the
agenda and attendance will be agreed by our customers to make the best
use of the time.
I will also try to ensure that we offer a variety of locations for future User
Groups as I appreciate that London isn’t ideal for all. There will be an update
sent out after the meeting covering the main points and any presentations or
documents that have been shared.
Richard Godfrey
ACCOUNT DIRECTOR
Local Government
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Final thought
Thank you for taking the time to read our first quarterly newsletter, we hope
that you’ve found it of interest and we look forward to bringing you more
information on Arcus and the work that we do.
We’re keen to hear from you all as to what information or case studies
you’d be interested in reading about in future editions and would welcome
offers to because studies in future editions. We’ll also be looking to add
more information around the partners we work with, give details of events
we’ll be attending and provide more company information. Please take the
opportunity to make the newsletter more relevant to yourselves by contacting
either Kate Warboys: kate.warboys@arcusglobal.com or Richard Godfrey:
richard.godfrey@arcusglobal.com with any suggestions or offers for case
studies.
Finally, as we work to providing a better service to our customers we would
be very grateful if you could fill out the following questionnaire, it should
take no more than a few minutes, but the questions are designed for us to
improve our Customer Service.
Click here to begin
Again, thank you for taking the time to read and from all of us at Arcus
Global we wish you a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year and look forward
to producing issue two in February.
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