Stoddart Group raises customer satisfaction by 42% by running on AWS

Stoddart Group is one of the leading suppliers and installers of products in the residential building industry in Australia. In an industry where developing trust with customers can make or break a business, Stoddart Group has managed to develop a network of over two thousand quality contractors that help in designing and building over thirty thousand homes a year. The organization has grown to employ over 500 staff in the 60 years that it has been in business. To address the increasing strain that its legacy IT infrastructure was placing on the growing business, Stoddart Group decided to migrate completely out of its on-premises environment, and went all-in with Amazon Web Services (AWS).

The building and construction industry is largely considered to be behind the curve in digital transformation. International Data Corporation (IDC) found that 58 percent of building and construction companies were either still resisting adoption of digital technologies, or only undertaking digital transformation initiatives on a project basis in a 2019 study. In Australia, construction companies cited outdated technologies as a key challenge. Prior to its engagement with AWS, Stoddart Group was facing similar problems with legacy IT infrastructure, which led to recurring downtime and data loss, resulting in 180 major outages a year.

Krushal Shah, IT director, Stoddart Group, says, “We were experiencing frequent IT outages that disrupted employees’ access to customer data, and we received up to a thousand customer service request issues each month. We needed to identify the root cause of this instability, and resolve it promptly.”

Improving customer and employee satisfaction became a key concern, and Stoddart Group knew that it needed to rethink its existing IT environment in order to achieve this. The organization then reached out to Idea 11, an AWS Partner Network (APN) partner, to conduct a full review of its current IT systems, and assess the feasibility of migrating to AWS cloud.

Idea 11 first conducted a cloud readiness assessment of Stoddart Group’s existing IT infrastructure to gain a comprehensive understanding of its IT maturity and potential challenges that might impede the migration to the cloud.

It found that there was a need to first revamp the company’s national network, before moving on to further stages of the migration. Idea 11 began with helping Stoddart Group centralize the management of its devices and data across its 36 offices, allowing for remote tasks to be performed easily across the entire network. With this improved agility, Idea 11 next focused on the full migration of Stoddart Group’s workloads to the cloud.

It worked closely with Stoddart Group to ensure that there was minimal disruption to the business throughout the migration process. By using cloud-native services such as AWS Lambda and AWS CodeDeploy, Stoddart Group was able to leverage Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) pipelines to deliver new digital functions at speed, and reduce its operational costs significantly.

“Initially, we were concerned that the migration may be both costly and time-consuming. Once we reviewed the assessment by Idea 11, it was clear that the benefits outweighed the investment. We are grateful to have worked with a partner that invested time in developing a comprehensive change management plan that addressed our foremost concerns,” adds Shah.

Stoddart Group believes that a mindset change—not just in executive leadership, but throughout the organization—is key in the move towards digitalization.

Shah adds, “A large part of the initial digitalization hurdle comes from a lack of information and understanding of how technologies such as the cloud can improve business outcomes. A partner that takes the time to guide you through the process—like Idea 11 did for us—goes a long way in overcoming that. It’s not just a technology change; it’s also about people and processes. If you take the time to upskill staff and set the right processes in place, I’d say that’s more than half the battle won.”

Since going all-in with AWS, Stoddart Group has seen an overall improvement in customer satisfaction from 55 percent to 78 percent. Incidences of service request issues have been reduced from a thousand to three hundred a month, and major outages have been eliminated. The company has also managed to significantly minimize its data loss, increasing its success rate for data backups from 62 percent to close to 100 percent. With these improvements, it is now better equipped to manage unforeseen circumstances as an organization.

With the migration to the cloud, the company also improved its internal service request response time by close to 90 percent, taking under 2 days to respond to a request, down from 19 days previously. This came into play in recent months, when Australia experienced coronavirus-imposed restrictions. Stoddart Group was able to quickly make the transition to remote working, enabling its workforce to continue serving customers efficiently and minimize business impact during the lockdown.

With the success that Stoddart Group has seen with its cloud migration thus far, the organization is evaluating other areas of improvement to its IT infrastructure, such as developing data lakes and analytics capabilities with AWS, to further enhance its offering for customers.