If you visited our website since March 2019 you’ll have noticed a number of changes. We’ve formalised our service lines to reflect the breadth of work that we perform across our diverse customer portfolio, and to offer prospective customers choice when assessing their requirements. Our ‘working for Comensura’ video highlights the diverse range of people that make our service what it is, and our case studies provide deep insights into how we’ve listened to our customers, identified their challenges, and found solutions to deliver a smarter way to work for them.
The new website and the way we’ve positioned our business is quite an evolution. It reflects our development as a business and sets the tone for our future direction. Underpinning it all however, is a celebration of why we came to market in the first place, what made our business the success that it is, and why we’re focused on continually delivering value for our customers.
Back to Basics
We’ve held a number of sessions internally to discuss the ‘why’ of Comensura. As an established and successful business we had become very adept at talking about ‘what’ we did and ‘how’ we did it, but rarely would we talk about ‘why’ we do what we do.
Comensura was originally created in 2001 to provide a neutral vendor managed service model that worked well for customers with complex contingent staffing requirements. Master Vendor/Single Supply models simply didn’t work for those customers as the vendors’ infrastructure couldn’t meet the customer’s multi-site and/or multi-job category requirements. Plus, the generalist nature of the master vendor’s supply capability couldn’t meet the customer’s specialised needs. This remains an issue for master vendor models even today.
As we talked through our ‘why’ we revisited one of our original business straplines ‘a smarter way to work’ and concluded that it perfectly encapsulated both our original market proposition and the way that our model has adapted to deliver value in new verticals and changing market conditions. ‘A smarter way to work’ has now become our business mantra and the absolute focus for what we do.
Start with the Customer and Work Back
The underlying premise of ‘a smarter way to work’ is that our focus as a business should be to deliver value for our customers. In order to do this we have to tune into our customers’ needs and adapt our model for their unique requirements. Broadly speaking, we consider five key opportunities to deliver value for our customers:
- Quality workers, on demand and at best value
- Minimised risk, maximum compliance
- Visibility and control
- Value for money
- Efficient processes that keep on improving
For each customer we have to consider how a smarter way to work can be applied to these opportunities, which are essentially the basics of how our model works. It’s a powerful and cathartic focus for us, as customer needs continually change, and it reminds us that if we lose our focus we run the risk of rendering our service transactional, and will potentially limit the value we deliver.
Giving Customers Choice
We have successfully grown our business into new markets in recent years and for each new market we have adapted our service to meet customer needs. To reflect our position more clearly, we have classified our managed services as either classic, adaptive or essential. These classifications not only reflect the range of services that we provide to existing customers, but are also designed to offer our potential customers choice based on their unique circumstances. Our existing customers also have the opportunity to redefine their model of choice, as and when their needs change.
Traditionally, descriptions of managed services have revolved around the MSPs supply strategy. Typically, neutral vendor MSPs don’t supply but manage the supply of workers via a supply chain. Master vendors try to maximise the amount of workers they supply and vend out the remainder and hybrid is, well master vendor in disguise. These descriptions imply that the service is all about the supply of workers, and the customer is buying off the shelf. As we will never supply workers directly, we felt that we should take a different classification route.
- Classic neutral vendor MSP is about giving a customer a systemised approach and transactional efficiency
- Adaptive MSP is about building on the efficiency of Classic by adding in highly bespoke supply chains and support services built with each hiring manager in mind
- Essential preferred supplier management is about providing the technology to help some customers to help themselves so this is more akin to software as a service with some wrap-around services
We believe our approach is at the time of writing, unique to our business.
We’ve always done more than maybe perceived so we’re making a big push to promote our MSP services to cover other categories such as permanent recruitment and limited company contractors.
Plus, promote our Select service packages that can be bought individually or bolted on to an MSP solution. These include direct contractor payrolling, Statement of Works and support services to help the efficient administration of worker compliance in areas such as pre-screening and compliance