Written by: Sam Morgan, IT Specialist
During my time at CXCS I have experienced the growth from what was a company specialising in one single service, to now providing five different services. It was a big move for the business to take on extra responsibility in the new areas, but time has proven that we made the right decision.
Last year CXCS employed a new member of the Team – Matt Sturtivant, a Software Developer from Herefordshire. This enabled CXCS to bring IT systems in-house where we have full control and can develop them according to business needs.
Our customer service is paramount to our success and it is not uncommon to receive words of praise about individual staff members and the company as a whole. I’ve had the pleasure of working alongside Matt to identify areas which could be improved further, along with a plan of action to deliver these new features. Now I would like to tell you a little bit about them.
Internal business software
For our cross compliance service, we have been using the same database for many years and it has become clear that it has been slowing us down. Ensuring that the correct information collected during our farm visits has been entered, involves a large amount of manual checking and collating.
To eliminate this problem, the new software which we will be launching in the coming months has built in checks for every rule known to us that could cause a breach. These automated checks will ensure the applications our farmers plan for the following year will not breach any rules under the cross compliance regulations. As before, we will let the client know of any planned applications that would breach the regulations and offer our advice on alternative solutions.
This software has been years in the planning and has been in development for over a year, we are very excited for our Administrative Team to get their hands on it.
Website
The past couple of years we have been keeping a close eye on how visitors use our website. A trend that has been developing is that the pages that deliver specific information are much more popular over other areas of our website.
Due to this we are re-designing and restructuring the website so you will be able to search for your questions and receive results like a dedicated search engine for anything that the CXCS services offer. Navigation will be much easier, and we are making efforts to provide faster page loading to offset the UK’s rural internet speeds being lower than average.
Client portal
Over the past few months we have also been busy developing our very own client portal on our website. The portal will be released in stages, and will eventually enable clients to directly access, upload and download relevant documents, putting our clients in the driving seat.
Over the next couple of months customers of CXCS will receive an email to log into the client portal. The first release will allow users to log in, update their details, add contacts within their business and 3rd parties. Users will also be able to update their email preferences through the online portal.
As multiple farm staff may need access to the information within the portal, we have added a user management feature where the administrator of the farm business account can add users, remove users and manage their permissions.
Future releases will include:
- Access to view/ download CXCS documents
- Ability to upload requested documents and information
- Add Agents to your account along with permissions to control what they can view/ edit
- Notifications on when your documents have been updated by our staff
Furthermore, we will be working with local clients to add more features that would be of interest to others.
I hope this gives a clear picture of the changes coming for CXCS. If you have any ideas or gaps within your IT systems that you believe would be a good fit within our client portal you can submit your ideas by clicking the link below and filling out the form.
