Winsborough Boosts Customer Service with 80% Faster Data Processing Using AWS

Winsborough specializes in leadership development and organizational consulting. Based in New Zealand, the business is focused on enhancing leadership capabilities across public and private industries. Its teams of business psychologists and leadership consultants provide executive development, talent assessment, and coaching, with every engagement tailored to the customer's needs.

Gus McIntosh, chief executive officer at Winsborough, has seen firsthand the increasing complexity of being an effective leader today. “The workplace has evolved thanks to a profusion of new technology,” he says, “and remote working has become normalized, changing team dynamics. New generations of employees also have different expectations from their managers.” With all the challenges facing current and future leaders, McIntosh is confident that the demand for Winsborough’s skillsets will continue to grow.

Data plays a crucial role in every Winsborough engagement, helping the company uncover customers' needs, develop a strategy, and measure progress. A few years ago, Winsborough digitized its data collection and analysis processes, expanding its IT systems and applications to enhance processing speed and customer convenience. “We wanted to take our technology to a new level to stop us from falling behind,” says Ariana Bascand, director of operations at Winsborough. However, she notes that there were scalability issues, and updates were time-consuming to deploy. McIntosh adds, “Deploying new features had become nearly impossible because of the infrastructure’s general rigidity. We needed to change.”

After experiencing problems with an initial IT transformation project, Winsborough engaged with AWS Partner Lancom Technology. Lancom proposed developing an enterprise platform on AWS to give Winsborough the flexible, easy-to-manage, high-performance technology for continued development. “Lancom offered us the technology skills we were looking for,” remembers McIntosh. “But Lancom’s difference was its level of communication. They worked closely to support us from the very beginning.”

With Lancom’s support, Winsborough developed an enterprise platform using cloud-native, modernized AWS services to maximize operational efficiency. The company built the new architecture using AWS Lambda, a serverless compute service, and AWS Fargate, a serverless, pay-as-you-go compute engine that helps customers focus on building applications rather than managing servers. McIntosh explains, “A modernized approach to AWS services was important to us because it would future-proof the scalability and management simplicity of our IT.”

With AWS services, Winsborough gained platform security and resiliency. The company also took advantage of AWS Availability Zones in the AWS Asia Pacific Region to ensure business continuity in case of disruption. Additionally, Winsborough used services like Amazon Cognito to manage platform user identity security, with features like single sign-on and custom authentication flows. Bascand explains, “With Amazon Cognito, we could meet the needs of our customers, many of whom are large corporate entities with strict digital security standards.”

Winsborough launched its Ka tipu te Rangatiratanga (Shoots of Leadership) Enterprise Platform on AWS in 2022. Since going live, the platform has delivered 100 percent uptime. Moreover, by creating a continuous integration/continuous delivery pipeline on AWS using AWS CodeBuild and AWS CodeDeploy, Winsborough can deliver software updates and roll out new features 50 percent faster to increase the platform’s value to customers.

By running its enterprise platform on AWS, Winsborough has upheld its commitment to providing world-class customer service. Consultants are collecting and analyzing data faster, giving them more face-to-face time with the people they support. “By using AWS, our consultants can create in-depth performance surveys and reports to analyze leaders’ challenges 80 percent faster—in 8 hours instead of 40,” says McIntosh.

What’s more, the platform has given Winsborough the ability to capture and digitize years of accumulated consultant experience and expertise more efficiently. For example, the process now saves significant time by eliminating manual data evaluation, which typically takes 2.5 hours per evaluation, improving turnaround times without sacrificing service quality—particularly for high-demand, high-value talent identification reports that must be delivered under tight deadlines. “The platform has automated many of the manual processes that consultants had to complete to make their evaluations,” explains McIntosh. Overall, the platform has helped Winsborough to provide insights to clients in a more timely and cost effective manner. “We can start working with our clients sooner, reducing the time to value for our services.”

Customer feedback for the Ka tipu te Rangatiratanga Enterprise Platform has been overwhelmingly positive. Customers appreciate the design aesthetic and intuitive user workflows that Lancom has built into the platform, noting that it’s easier to complete tasks like leadership assessments and surveys. Comments Bascand, “Our survey participation rate is 90 percent on AWS, compared to the industry average of 60 percent.”

Winsborough has also seen a 15 percent improvement in its bottom line due to the platform's cost-effectiveness. With the support of Lancom, the company plans to invest the freed-up resources back into platform evolution as part of a long-term strategy of continual improvement. Projects on the horizon include the possible adoption of Amazon Translate, which offers fluent and accurate machine translation. “This service could deliver real value to current and future customers where English is not their first language,” says McIntosh. “There are so many possibilities in how we could use AWS with Lancom’s support.”