The company was founded by Chris, an IT professional with 20 years working with the Web and Internet technologies. He is still working hands-on in the company delivering consultancy and maintains good connections to other experts in the field.

Chris spent the eight years as a consultant for Firmstep, the supplier of a widely-used customer experience platform. As a company MadCowInternet has a wealth of knowledge of the Firmstep ecosystem and working with Firmstep users is the focus of our work, but adaptability is our strength and we can work with any web technology.

Where is the focus of our experience?

  • Improving front-line customer service
    In everything we do our consultants focus on helping our customers to make their customers’ experience better. Whether this is by simplifying a front-line form, or by building a whole new form-based process, we take the same approach:

    • We will develop a solution that is easy to use.
    • We provide an independent challenge to existing ways of working.
    • We aim to produce a quick prototype which can then be iterated in an Agile way to quickly release the earliest usable product. Then iterate the product until it is awesome and lovable.
  • Service redesign
    Every organisation has business processes that can be improved through a digital transformation. We can help challenge ways of working and discover ways that a business process can be improved. Having worked with a great team of consultants over the last few years Madcowinternet can pull in further business analysis and project management expertise as and when we need to bolster our in-house skills.
  • Firmstep platform
    The consultants that MCI uses all have over five years’ experience working with the Firmstep Customer Experience Platform. So between us we’ve worked on everything from the start of a platform implementation to the go-live, and providing support and services to Firmstep customers after go-live.
  • Integrations with back-office systems
    We recognise that to make real savings in a process you need to get information from one place to another without needing a human interaction. This is why integrating your forms is so important.
    We’ve worked with countless database systems, web services, HTTP APIs to pull data into forms or push it into a system from the form.
    Payment connectors are another common integration from forms, and over the years we’ve worked to integrate all the major payment providers (Civica, Capita, Paris into Forms.

What sort of services have we transformed?

  • Financial Services
    Our most recent project has been a year working on business transformation for an offshore private finance company. Here we’ve used the Firmstep Platform to prototype improvements to their accountancy processes, their client take-on process, and their compliance monitoring processes.
    In the course of this project MCI worked with a team of transformation consultants (The F-Team) to develop and refine best practices, and would be excited to see some of the lessons from this environment applied to other sectors.
  • Housing
    We’ve done lots of work on housing. We’ve worked with a local authority to streamline their homelessness application process and their priority applications for Choice-based Lettings.
    For another customer we developed the SQL scripts to extract data from their housing system for their MyAccount solution for tenants.
  • Adult Social Care
    Over the years our consultants have been involved in several stages of social care processes. An appreciation of the complexities of social care delivery will help us quickly understand the requirements of future social care projects.
  • Waste management
    Waste management has been a recurring theme when our network of consultants have worked with public sector. With bin collections and recycling one of the most visible front-line services for it is no surprise that this is usually one of the high priorities for service redesign.
    The most effective solutions demand integration with back-office waste management systems (we’ve worked with Whitespace and Bartec in the past), but there are still efficiency gains to be found without a full system integration.
  • Local Authority Licensing
    Licensing is a service that has a form for everything. All too often these forms are downloadable PDFs. By building an e-form to replace the paper and PDFs you can leverage the intelligence of e-forms to validate content and ensure that you receive a complete application. By reducing the time spent rejecting applications or requesting missing information staff time is freed up to perform tasks that demand human intelligence. If a licence requires a payment adding an integration to a payment portal means that when you receive an application it’s paid for – no reconciling payments or waiting for a cheque to arrive.
    Of back-office licensing systems it is probably Idox Uniform that we have integrated with most frequently, although the same integration principles could be applied to other back-office systems.