Prolific North Tech Awards: Finalists 2023

Tech Award Finalists

We are excited to announce that Ultimate are finalists for the “Transformation Through Tech Award” at the 2023 Prolific North Tech Awards.

Prolific North is an independent news and events publisher for the digital and creative sectors in the North of England. They promote the North as a hub for creativity and innovation, and play an important role in supporting the region’s digital and creative space. The prolific north tech awards celebrate outstanding work within the technology sector.

When we saw that Prolific North were on the search for a project that had completely transformed a business through technology, we knew we had a project to shout about!

Working with our brilliant client ITS over the last three years we have created a digital sales portal which allows ITS tech partners to search for quotes, place orders and track their progress to delivery, all from one user centred digital space.

Through business insight and customer story mapping, we were able to address each and every challenge and pain point that they experienced with other platforms, to allow our solution to stand out from competitors and be as intuitive as possible. Since launching the portal has generated £33.5 Million in customer contracts and represents over 40% of all business generated.

Objective

In the words of the Chief Executive, our brief was to create a solution for a partner “to allow his business to operate & generate business whilst he slept.” Since launching the partner portal we have continued to optimise and streamline the digital experience by integrating it with the Salesforce CRM as well as creating a fully configurable area within the customer requirements form. This means ITS now has the ability to offer a wide range of different ’add ons’ to a main circuit and configure logic through a UI which then presents itself on the front of the portal in a user friendly layout. Through our continual optimisation of the portal, we have been able to design and build core functionality that sets ITS apart from their competitors with this industry leading technology.

Target audience and strategy

Only after extensive user research, specifically against their challenges and preferences with competitors, wireframes and user journeys were created. An innovative and intuitive digital sales portal which allows partners of ITS to:

search quotes
place orders
track progress to delivery all in one digital space.

Putting the end user at the heart of the creation of the portal, through business insight and user mapping, we addressed each and every challenge and pain point that they had experienced with other platforms, allowing our solution to stand out from the crowd and be as seamless an experience as possible.

Implementing the portal

Through our continual optimisation and iterative design of the portal, we have been able to design and build core functionality that sets ITS apart from their competitors and is industry leading technology.

These continual optimisations include:

Fully configured payloads for each product so that ITS can request specific information from the partner on the form and Salesforce will receive this information to be able to process the order against its fully automated workflows.
A streamlined PDF form that could be used as legal confirmation of an order for both ITS and their customers, including customisable colour palettes, logos and Terms & Conditions for each brand. These PDFs are now used as a reference point for all orders externally and internally as they allow partners to manage and track their orders whilst scaling their sales opportunities due to ease of summary details.
Provided ITS’s marketing team with a more flexible communication channel through the portal’s dashboard banners
Ability to provide partners with more accurate lead times for delivery of certain types of circuit, such as Near Net/Early Bird Products which reuse existing infrastructure and help the planet whilst providing partners with a better price and lead time. Providing ITS with editable areas like this allows them to be reactive & Proactive to their own partners and their customers.

Results that led Ultimate to becoming tech award finalists

Don’t just take our word for it, below are the results that ITS have achieved since implementing the portal:

£33.5 Million generated in real contracts since launching and continually optimising the portal
1.4 Million searches on the portal Sep 22- July 23
164% rise in orders Sep 22- July 23 vs Sep 21- July 22
The portal now represents over 40% of all business generated. In 2021/22 their turnover was £9 million with a growth forecast of £27m in 2022/23. The reliance upon the portal and API continues to increase as the business continues to scale and grow.

Investment giant, Aviva, injected £45M to fast track their full fibre rollout plans with ITS in 2020. Since then ITS has built its networks past nearly 55% of the UK and is 3rd in the UK business premises behind Virgin and BT. Aviva has subsequently invested an additional £100m in 2022/23.

These targets would not be possible without the growth driven from partners, and is evident in the ever-growing number of over 600 partners not only signing up but continually using and returning to the platform, becoming their ‘go to’ as a provider for quotes – a task that is not as easy as it sounds when there is such fierce competition in the market from the big names such as BT Openreach, Sky and Virgin. Read our full case study detailing our partnership with ITS here – Case Study – ITS Technology

displaying the ITS portal on a computer screen