“We won!” said the text on 20 November. And just six days later, the same two words made it a brace for the Capita O2 Partnership – and 100% of the awards they’d chosen to enter.
Capita had approached us in the summer for help to get their ground-breaking partnership the profile it deserved in the industry.
They had their sights set on the CCA Excellence Awards, specifically the best outsourcing partnership category, and the National Outsourcing Association Awards’ best off-shoring project.
We worked with a small internal team from both Capita and its partner Telefonica to write both entries and pull together supporting information.
The CCA Excellence Awards have a very robust process which involves passing the first test with a written entry and then a telephone interview. Our award get them a pass through to the second round, but the win was also very much down to Capita’s performance during that interview.
Chairman of the CCA Global Awards judging panel Andrew Mends said: “This year’s winners should be exceptionally proud because it was the most competitive field ever with a record number of international as well as UK entrants. Our panel of 50 judges had a very difficult task in picking winners because the quality of submissions was so high.”
The NOA’s judge the awards on entries only, using a panel of highly-respected industry professionals. Both sets of awards are run by professional bodies which are precious about the quality of entries they shortlist, as they truly have to be at the top of the industry.
It was no surprise to us that the awards were shortlisted. The partnership, which delivers all of the customer service for O2, is an industry first, is worth £1.25bn and has been formed for 10 years. The transition to deliver all of the customer services was done with no loss of quality, maintaining O2’s spot as the mobile brand with the least complaints according to industry regulator Ofcom.
The offshoring project which won the NOA award established a 300-person contact centre from zero to operational in three months with no loss of sales and an increase in quality of customer service during that time.
National Outsourcing Association CEO, Kerry Hallard said: “Once again we received a record number of entries with strong submissions from many of the industry’s key providers, as well as entries from an increasing number of new players. The standard of submissions showed a growing display of innovation and business transformation through outsourcing.”
It’s always good to hear that your clients are winners as what we can’t control is the competition. We could have written the best entry of the bunch, but if your competitor’s numbers are 10% better than yours, there’s nothing we can do about it.
A wise person once said you can only control the controllables and that is never more the case than with awards.
Victoria Wright, Capita’s Director of Communications for the partnership, said: “Awards Writers did a great job of collating and sifting through the information we sent over. They challenged on areas where we needed to provide better evidence and helped us tell a coherent story in each of our award entries.
“All superfluous information was filtered out and Awards Writers kept us focused on the criteria to ensure we did the best with our entry and our evidence.
“We were delighted to have won both awards and the positive effect of the wins has rippled throughout the partnership.”