Gunnebo Australia is a provider of security solutions and services for businesses, offering complete protection for assets, people and buildings. The portfolio of offerings includes solutions for cash management, entrance control, hostile vehicle mitigation, ballistic/blast/attack-proof doors, windows & partitions, safes and vaults. Gunnebo Australia also provides a full range of services that help customers manage their security systems and extend the lifecycle of their security products.

Operating in a multitude of industries including banks, retail, mass transit, public & commercial buildings and industrial & high-risk sites, Gunnebo Australia has an annual turnover of AUD32 million and employs some 45 people across Australia and New Zealand, with a further 25 people located in Gurugram, India. The business directly employs local R&D capabilities that have developed the Cash Management technology that is installed in approximately 6,000 sites throughout the nation. Gunnebo Australia is well respected in the security industry and is often considered to be the supplier of choice due to the quality of products as well as its deep industry expertise which presents a lower-risk delivery model for customers. Many of the products offered by Gunnebo Australia are certified to European Standards to ensure the level of durability and business resilience required to secure the nation’s critical assets. Gunnebo Australia also owns the rights to the Chubbsafes brand which is well recognised in both the commercial and residential markets.

Through an understanding of their customers’ business, Gunnebo Australia provides solutions that deliver lifetime value to their customers, in turn driving sustainable, profitable growth for the business. The Strategic Principle guides the decision-making process in every part of the business to ensure that all parts of the business are aligned. From a service perspective this meant transitioning from a very reactive service model to one that was more proactive, and customer focussed, measuring the impact of change through the implementation of Net Promoter Score (NPS). Changes have been made to the Quality Assurance systems and processes to reduce the time to rectify customer issues as well as increase first-time fix rates. At the same time, changes were made that allow for invoices for non-contracted services to be raised within an hour of the work being completed which has had a positive impact on operational cash flow for the business.

Gunnebo Australia have embarked on a Customer Experience journey that has enabled better customer interactions and has sped up the time to respond to customer enquiries. This puts Gunnebo Australia in an excellent position to continue to add value to its customers whilst enabling sustainable, profitable growth for the business.

Since moving the finance and service coordination aspects of the service business to India in 2013, continual reviews of the operations have been undertaken as part of Gunnebo Australia’s Strategic Plan. These reviews and ongoing changes to the service model have resulted in a transition from simple process handling to more of a knowledge centre. Setting service as a key component of its strategy bought about a renewed focus from a leadership and planning perspective. The sales organisation became tasked with the responsibility of converting customers to service level agreements; Net Promoter Score was introduced as the key mechanism to measure customer loyalty; and technical training programs were developed to enable cross-functional training of the field-based service technicians to enable better responsiveness to customer issues. Use of technology was another key consideration for Gunnebo Australia when planning how best to manage its pool of service technicians effectively and efficiently, making sure that minimum distances are travelled between service jobs to maximise responsiveness to the customers. To enable this, Gunnebo Australia installed GPS devices into its service vehicles which allows the service coordinators to assign the closest skilled resource to a service job. Customer validated sign-off was another factor that was important to cover in order to demonstrate to the end-customer that a service job had been completed. It had previously been an issue as many times the person reporting the service issue was not the same person on-site who would close the job on the customer’s behalf. This required Gunnebo Australia to investigate low-cost technologies that could close the communications gap and validate that any given service job was completed to the customer’s satisfaction.

Through continuous review, Gunnebo Australia identified areas for improvement within its service and operations delivery and as such implemented a task force to deep dive into the associated processes and develop a plan for improvement. This review identified some 29 key actions, all with subsequent action lists to be completed. The review and subsequent improvements ran over a 6-month period and has been instrumental in both improving the levels of service delivered as well as reducing the cost-to-serve significantly. Implementation of the plans developed by Gunnebo Australia for the service initiative have been an ongoing process since the establishment of its India operations. Careful documentation of the processes has enabled staff to be more easily trained, and reward and recognition programs have been designed to incentivise staff to continue to be customer focussed. To integrate the operations in India with the broader business, Gunnebo Australia continues to both send staff to India to work from the offices there and brings staff from India to work within the Gunnebo Australia business. This enables a better understanding of the cultural differences and helps to close some of the communication gaps that happen as a result of working remotely. There is ownership in Gunnebo Australia of each business function that has been moved to India to make sure that the customer is always at the centre of all interactions.

From the initial establishment of the operations in India to now, there has been significant benefit realised from its implementation. More processes have been moved to India, costs have reduced, and customer satisfaction has increased. The role of the India operations has expanded to include elements of Project Management, software testing, remote technical service capabilities and marketing analysis. It is now an embedded part of the Gunnebo Australia business and an important factor in the Customer Experience journey. Many of Gunnebo Australia’s customers are now covered by comprehensive service agreements and a number are moving to other value-based services such as reporting and analytics, and Software as a Service, which speaks volumes to the Strategic Principle of delivering lifetime value.