When moving managed services from an incumbent to a new partner, a successful transition phase is critical to ensuring long-term success. This phase includes not only migrating support or implementation, but also maintaining website stability during the switch, as well as identifying future opportunities. Before bringing on a new partner, every brand should think about how to best collaborate with their new team to set a foundation to accelerate performance vs. the incumbent.
In Astound’s experience transitioning best-in-class global brands from old partners, we’ve compiled a number of key activities to keep in mind:
The Process
- Technical Audit: The first step in a successful transition is for the new partner to analyze all available documentation to deeply understand the client’s current architecture, functionality and project setup. This enables us to evaluate technical debt, find opportunities to improve (e.g. code/architecture, automation) and uncover more efficient ways of working. In the project setup phase, we cover everything from creating sandboxes; getting test automation code; and identifying new best practices.
-
Solution Discovery: Generally conducted through a series of workshops, Discovery helps us really get to know our new client (and vice versa), not only building rapport, but also understanding the current state. A large transition can include 100+ hours of calls, many onsite visits, hundreds of hours auditing systems and multiple stakeholder interviews across client teams like IT; Marketing and Corporate Communications; and Customer Service.
-
Quality Assurance: Oftentimes our first official production build for the new client, we will transition or create all the required activities from the previous partner, define test cases/plan, deploy and carry out activation testing.
-
24/7 Support: In the last phase of the transition, we generally set up 24/7 monitoring for L1/L2 support, including health check monitoring, application monitoring, environment monitoring, etc.
The Opportunity
Beyond continuation, transitioning to a new partner is a great opportunity for a reset to pave the way for future business outcomes. The transition comes with enthusiasm and the willingness to embrace change to overcome common challenges, which we identify during the transition process. These include:
Business Strategy
- Excessive reliance on manual processes (reporting, workflows), resulting in less time to plan and activate
- Resourcing challenges
- Reactive mindset
- Siloed teams, redundant processes and inefficiencies
Customer Insights
- No single source of truth/Customer 360
- Disconnected end-to-end experience mapping across customer touchpoints
- Inability to activate insights from customer data/structure large data sets
Technology
- Too much complexity
- Not getting enough value out of the tech stack; leaving money on the table
Ready to make the switch? We'll create a tailored roadmap to drive your business forward.
Contact an Astound specialist today to explore the possibilities.
