The Brief
The North East Growth Hub Cluster (GH) wanted a cloud-based segmentation and diagnostic platform that was aligned to the North East Strategic Economic Plan, and able to be used by all Cluster partners.
The aim of the platform was to create the foundation needed to underpin the GH vision to provide a more impactful business support ecosystem. They wanted the platform to better align and integrate the collective endeavours of all Cluster stakeholders to deliver transformational impact – in terms of business creation, growth, improvement and scale up. On a practical level, the platform had to be capable of capturing data across multiple channels including:
- Online Expression of Interest forms
- Triage teams when responding to public enquiries
- GH advisers when completing diagnostic interventions.
The required activities were broken down into four distinct work packages:
- Co-create the segmentation and diagnostic framework: produce a structure that assesses the business practices that lead to high performance levels.
- Online platform development, including:
- design and program a robust, secure base that hosts user-friendly diagnostics for use by GH advisers, partners and local businesses
- collection of data and output of results through reports clearly showing strengths and weaknesses, as well capturing opportunities for improvement
- a content management and administration console to facilitate performance management of the service
- Dashboards to present data and intelligence on business segmentation and diagnostic outcomes.
- GH adviser training: up to 40 advisers trained to use the segmentation and diagnostic software platform.
- Support and maintenance, including technical and adviser support, system maintenance, cyber security including applying patches and technology updates as required.
The Solution
Our co-created solution resolved a variety of challenges the GH was facing:
- Most business support programmes use turnover and employee numbers as the basis for segmenting and targeting businesses. This approach is limited as it doesn’t provide any intelligence on the targeted business’s levels of competitiveness, ambition, competitive horizon, business model and growth dynamic – all factors that need to be understood early in a business support relationship to determine the most impactful customer journey.
- Identifying businesses that can have scale up potential and can consequently have the greatest impact to growing the local economy in future.
- The lack of a consistent segmentation and business support taxonomies makes it difficult to effectively structure and coordinate business support provision simply and efficiently.
- Businesses are subject to ‘paralysis by diagnosis’ in the form of multiple diagnostic interventions, all taking a marginally different approach when exploring similar areas – this creates duplication and inefficiency in the system and frustrates recipients.
- The current infrastructure makes it difficult to aggregate data and analytics to enable need-based targeting of communications and services and to understand the effectiveness of different business support pathways.
To address these problems, we developed a system that introduced efficiencies and supported the delivery of more streamlined business support customer journeys and developed a simpler and more impactful ecosystem. This was achieved through:
- An infrastructure that better connected and aligned provision into a single system
- A modern approach to segmentation and business support solution design
- The use of intelligence and data (through business segmentation, diagnostic and support interventions) to target communications and interventions that ‘nudge’ businesses’ mindsets and aspirations towards a point where their true potential can be realised
- Aligning policy, strategy, funding and delivery structures
- Avoiding duplication and fragmentation at a national, regional and local level.
The Outcome
The platform was completed and made live early in 2023. Main outputs to date include:
- Co-creating the content for a generic business model diagnostic that offers an insightful assessment of business performance
- Producing an ‘Entrepreneur Profile’ engagement tool, essentially a growth segmentation application that identifies high growth performance and potential
- Customising our well-established BenchmarkIndex® platform to offer a user-friendly online resource for GH administrators and business advisers.
- Training North East and Tees Valley advisers how to utilise the service to offer clients maximum impact.
- Ongoing technical and user support.
The tools and intelligence gleaned have quickly become critical and underpinning components of the GH business support offer at all stages of the customer journey, including:
- Engagement: Marketing and lead generation enabling the GH to target businesses more intelligently with products, services and funding relevant to them, and identify SMEs with the greatest potential to drive economic growth.
- Defining relevant and appropriate Segmentation and Determining Support Pathways.
- Objective assessment of a business’s overall strengths and weaknesses, helping to prioritise opportunities for improvement that will have greatest impact.
- Introducing a robust means to develop high impact action plans and effective brokerage to other support provision available through the local business support ecosystem.
- Centralised data and intelligence gathering demonstrated through Information Dashboards, providing insights that are helping to determine impact, and demonstrating where local support needs are to inform where finite support resources can be best invested.
Over 100 SMEs have already benefitted from the service, with many more set to be supported more effectively using the tools over the years to come. It is completely scalable, and we are already planning the next phase of development, in the form of new, even more advanced functionality and co-creating additional modules on finance, innovation and international trade.