When a Customer Wants a New Provider

ABOUT THIS CUSTOMER

This customer provides comprehensive services to hospital-based physicians in many states across the country. Their mission is to provide professionally qualified and experienced teams to help clients achieve efficiency, profitability and sustainable success.

WHY THIS CUSTOMER WANTED TO CHANGE SERVICE PROVIDERS

For 15 years, this customer had a strong relationship with their service provider; however, over time, this service provider was acquired by a much larger Tier-1 player. Over the last few years an underlying sentiment had been growing: this Tier-1 provider may have become “too big” for this customer.

The Senior Management team was concerned that their current vendor may not be providing the most cost effective solution, nor were they being responsive. This was essential to ensure the customer was meeting their commitment to their clients, helping their clients to achieve efficiency, profitability and sustainable success, and enabling them to remain competitive in the marketplace.

It was decided to begin a project to determine if there was another service provider who could provide excellent service, at a lower cost, with minimal risk.

FINDING THE RIGHT SERVICE PROVIDER

An internal review resulted in the formulation of a requirements document and determination of all critical criteria. The customer asked each vendor specific questions (in additional to their requirements document response) such as:

• Are you the outsourcer or a third party that’s going to subcontract to another outsourcer?
• Do you have deep talent specific to particular platform environments?

The search began with an initial list of 10 vendors. It was quickly narrowed down to 5 vendors, and responses with budgetary pricing were then requested. This eliminated all but 3 service providers: the incumbent, another Tier-1, and Blue Hill. Whether a vendor was a “Tier 1” or “Tier 2” considered provider was of less importance to this customer’s management than finding a service provider with specific platform expertise and experience, with good financials, and with a business plan supporting longevity “to ensure that they would be in business for a while.”

A critical part of the due diligence and evaluation process was reference checks. “It was very important and part of the due diligence process to find a service provider partner with a culture that matched ours. Our service provider partner must always go above and beyond and must continually strive to provide good service. In my dual reporting and responsibility role to both the business unit and to the IT corporate side, this is extremely important.”

After much evaluation and diligence, Blue Hill was chosen “because of their experience, technical knowledge, dedication and responsiveness to support the environment.”

FROM CONTRACT THROUGH MIGRATION

Blue Hill’s flexibility during the contract phase (even using the customer’s existing contract template) made things simpler, provided a quicker turnaround and enabled the agreement to get to contract signing quickly. This flexibility saved time, effort and expense, since there were virtually no T’s and C’s changed.

“ITO service provider partners must be flexible. As each customer has their own unique environment, the fact that we didn’t have to change our existing processes to accommodate Blue Hill was huge…I found the technicians at Blue Hill to be very accommodating, and the whole Blue Hill team certainly wanted to make sure that our needs were getting met.”

During the migration process, a lot of detailed planning occurred, beginning with a standard plan that was fine-tuned as required.

“During the migration, I liked that I could pick up the phone and talk to anyone in the senior management team. Blue Hill was going to be responsible for running our mission critical applications, so it was extremely important to make sure I had access to Blue Hill’s senior management at all times. Blue Hill is a very flat organization, which is similar to us; we mesh well together, it is a partnership relationship.”

EXPECTATIONS ARE MET, AND THE RELATIONSHIP GROWS

“Blue Hill met my expectations. Blue Hill’s process is built upon a “classic data center” model methodology, and classic methodologies work. Time has proven that a partnership relationship works very well. From a technical standpoint, the Blue Hill team has shown very good technical skills, there’s no question about it. The outcome was exactly as we planned and prepared for, a migration that was transparent and non-disruptive to the business! …and, our annual expenditures decreased by over 50%.”