MatsSoft Top 3 Bank Migration Project
The need
In 2011, under a European Commission ruling, a top 3 UK Bank was required to sell over 300 of its branches. The sale included the transfer of over 1.8 million customer accounts and 240,000 corporate clients.
The deadline to complete the project was incredibly short and a solution had to be found quickly.
A newly designed process and related technology was needed to enable Relationship Managers (RM’s) to manage their customers’ migration efficiently, with all the appropriate governance and control in place.
The Bank’s already busy IT team evaluated the project and although they provided options, they were based on custom-built databases and spread sheets. Taking significant time and resource to create and implement, the proposed solution would miss out key features such as customer communications and Management Information and would have missed the migration deadline.
The solution
MatsSoft already provided the Bank with a range of solutions to manage workflow, customer and third party communications and automated reporting, for a number of its business units.
MatsSoft was invited to discuss the Migration project and a solution was delivered that met all functional and business requirements well within the budget. This approach rapidly secured senior stakeholder buy-in.
MatsSoft configured its MATS® solution, completed user acceptance testing, passed penetration testing and security audits by the Bank and launched within just 6 weeks.
The system was very well received by management, Change Managers and Relationship Managers.
The results
By using MATS® the Bank was able to track every step of the process for every customer case, automatically communicate to the RMs when they had a particular task to perform, communicate key messages to the customer during the whole process and track completions.
The business was able to view the performance of the project in real-time through the comprehensive Management Information reporting suite.
Due to the success of the project, a further Migration wave was planned and implemented, again within budget and deadline.
The solution provided
• Significant cost reduction by using well-established technology
• High satisfaction levels from customers
• Total process transparency
• Audit trails for all activity by processing staff and Relationship Managers
• Built in governance
• Real-time reporting
• Real-time communications by SMS, Email and Web
How MATS® keeps more customers smiling and profits up in financial services
MATS® is used by some of the world’s biggest companies to join-up workflow, stakeholder communications and real-time performance.
It’s a web-based, managed service that quickly delivers substantial return on investment through increased profitability, efficiency, customer experience and satisfaction.
Executive Summary
A lack of communication during the application process was losing one of the largest payment processors in the UK customers and increasing operating costs. By implementing MATS®, communication became more frequent, more automated and designed around customer preferences.
Through cost-effectively keeping in touch with businesses, the client was able to improve customer satisfaction and the efficiency of its call-centre agents.
The need
New customers require personal identification and business financial checks. However, it was a typically complex application process. Multiple documents needed to be signed and returned meaning many customers dropped out before completion.
For those that stayed the course, often the first communication they received was the acceptance or rejection notification.
“We had feedback that customers weren’t informed as to where they were in the process, so this was a key issue that we needed to address.”
The lack of communication also had a secondary impact on the business. A rising number of inbound calls from applicants increased operating costs. Each potential applicant is a small business that may process a significant amount of payments. In terms of feeling valued, the customer experience was not good.
The solution
The managed service implemented with MATS® automatically communicates with customers throughout the application process. Customers set their preferences, whether SMS, email or a mixture of the two. They are then kept up-to-date with the status of their application.
The easy-to-use software frees staff to focus on processing applications. It removes many of the administrative tasks they previously carried out. The system can also send out reminders to customers to return signed documents. This removes the need and cost of outbound call handling.
“The additional benefits of MATS® being a managed service meant that we didn’t have to do any of our integration work – we have limited resource available and many competing priorities, therefore making our own internal system changes can prove costly.”
The results
A pilot programme was implemented where a selection of new applicants were split into two groups. In the first group the application was managed in the traditional way. In the second, the application was managed with MATS®.
“During the test and learn we saw a 5.5% increase in conversion rates with MATS® as compared to the control group, from 35% to just above 40%. We have reasonably high annual net income per customer and around 50,000 leads per year, so a relatively slight increase in conversion rates can significantly increase our profit.”
Customer satisfaction and experience has also been boosted. Research identified MATS® as a magic moment for customers. They felt they were getting enhanced B2C customer service from a B2B transaction. And we all know the value of happy customers.
happiness made easy®
MATS® is used by some of the world’s biggest companies to join-up workflow, stakeholder communications and real-time performance.
It’s a web-based, managed service that quickly delivers substantial return on investment through increased profitability, efficiency, customer experience and satisfaction.
Executive Summary
The perception and the actuality of poor customer service levels from contact and processing centres is regularly experienced by the majority of consumers.
The growing pressure on businesses to ‘Do More For Less’ by winning and retain customers, improving customer service levels and reduce costs, whilst frequently having budgets frozen or cut, only adds to this problem.
These seemingly incompatible objectives mean that often the outcome is achieving one objective at the expense of another, with the customer’s experience of dealing with a business being the most vulnerable to degradation, particularly in straightened economic times.
But this doesn’t have to be the case and MATS® can help deliver positive and measurable outcomes against all these performance criteria.
The problem
John is at his wits end. He waited for over 30 minutes in a telephone queue only to be told when he eventually got through that they couldn’t resolve his query because they didn’t have access to the relevant customer file. It was the second time that had happened. Despite the inevitable extra work, John even considered moving his business elsewhere.
Helen almost gave up her job in a busy contact/processing centre because of the stress from constant calls from frustrated customers, just like John, wanting to know what was going on with their case.
The solution
Then they started to use MATS® and these chaser calls dropped by more than half.
By pushing communications to customers by SMS text message, email and automatically updated personal web pages (each time a key stage in the process was reached, or when some information was needed from the customer for the case to proceed). Suddenly, inbound and outbound telephone traffic volumes fell away.
Almost overnight, Helen found that with much fewer interruptions she and her colleagues were able to process more cases in the time available. These reduced completion times further improved the customer’s experience.
And the benefits didn’t stop there as printing and postal volumes and costs were cut and the delays associated with postal activity were removed so cycle times reduced further still.
As well as having an accurate and user-friendly dashboard to help her progress with all her cases, Helen’s manager (and her boss too) had access to real time management information and the ability to produce accurate and bang up-to-date reports at the click of a mouse.
The results
So, thanks to MATS® John is now a satisfied customer. Not only has he gone on to purchase other products and services from the company Helen works for, he has also given them a very favourable rating for customer satisfaction in an online survey on his MATS® personal web page. He’s even recommended Helen’s company to family and friends.
And, as for Helen, her job has changed for the better. Now she enjoys helping customers with genuine enquiries and completing cases more quickly and efficiently. She’s recently received a performance related bonus for delivering exceptional customer service and now she enjoys true job satisfaction.
In fact, far from looking for another job, she's going to apply for the next team leader role that comes up.
Helen almost gave up her job in a busy contact/ processing centre because of the stress from constant calls from frustrated customers like John, wanting to know what was going on with their case.
Then they started to use MATS® and these chaser calls dropped by more than half.
ISA processing made easy with MATS®
MATS® is used by some of the world’s biggest companies to join-up workflow, stakeholder communications and real-time performance.
It’s a web-based, managed service that quickly delivers substantial return on investment through increased profitability, efficiency, customer experience and satisfaction.
Executive Summary
2008 and the years since have proved to be very challenging for ISA providers.
The volatility of the financial markets, allied to the Government's approach to guaranteeing savings in UK banks and building societies, led to massive, unprecedented and unexpected volumes of ISA transfer activity.
This in turn created large backlogs of ISA cases and ISA transfers, both in and out, for many financial services organisations. The outcome was delays, broken SLA’s, complaints and ultimately costly lost interest and compensation payments.
The solution called for a system that could easily scale to cope with these peaks of activity, whilst at the same time providing joined up workflow, customer communications, SLA’s, and accurate, real time Management Information - namely MATS®.
The problem
What happens when your infrastructure buckles under the strain of a huge upsurge in processing volumes?
Large financial services businesses cannot react overnight to issues that appear unexpectedly with little lead-time or notice.
That’s exactly what happened when the global financial crisis erupted in 2008. Government’s put in place guarantees to safeguard consumer’s savings, but these guarantees were capped. This meant a huge upsurge in the volume of new ISA’s being created as people moved savings in and out of various banks and building societies.
Usually the first things that breaks when big case volumes increases occur at short notice are the published service levels. This results in a surge in chaser phone calls and complaints from customers, which further clog up the system. The end result is a poor customer experience, bad PR, compensation claims and even fines and sanctions.
The solution
MATS<sup>®</sup> for ISA was specified and built over an eight week period to handle any volume of new ISA accounts, transfers in and out of exisiting ISA's and consolidations.
With a full suite of custom, real time Management Information, active workflow dashboards and proactive communications to notify customers as things happen, MATS<sup>®</sup> for ISA allows:
- full ‘track and trace’ of all ISA activity,
- exposure of all inflow and outflow of funds giving Treasury Reports for an up-to- the-minute picture of all liabilities and gains,
- shows which banks and building societies are requesting transfers and from where new customers are moving their money.
The results
Nationwide Building Society, one of the UK’s top ISA providers in both volume and value terms, used MATS<sup>®</sup> for ISA to manage the ISA peak in March and April 2011, managing weekly volumes in six-figures.
It achieved this whilst also delivering large efficiency gains and cost savings. At the same time Nationwide achieved excellent customer satisfaction ratings.
Commented Ian Thompson, Interim Head of ISA Processing, Nationwide, “MatsSoft has made a telling contribution to Nationwide achieving its best ever ISA peak performance in spring 2011. Not only did the society process record levels of ISA business, but we did so whilst achieving significant operational cost reductions and gaining consistently high customer service ratings”.
Smarter service delivery for better customer experience and lower operating costs
By Martin Scovell, CEO, MatsSoft Ltd (as published in the December 20011 issue of 'Public Servant')
“I’ve been in enough meetings with public sector clients now to recognise that the ‘Doing More For Less’ argument doesn’t need to be made any more. It’s a given. In fact, some of my clients would argue that it’s a philosophy that they’ve had to adopt for a lot longer than the last 18 months or so.
What really matters today is smarter service delivery, so the customer becomes the focus of the organisation. That process starts internally. You don’t have to trawl
too far into the media to find examples where lack of consistent processes and good communications between agencies, departments, teams or individuals has?had serious consequences. And without?a fundamental shift in managing workflow and communication, there’s nothing to stop similar cases happening again.
MATS®, our web-based managed software service, provides managers with joined up communications, workflow and configurable service levels, plus a real time over-view of workload and completion rates via a sophisticated reporting suite.
So, you can identify potential blockages, check that service levels and response rates are being met and target resources more effectively. This ensures that people across the organisation are sharing information and the automatic audit trails created by MATS® provide the information needed for strong governance. With MATS® you will ultimately deliver more services using the same or less resource and have the evidence to prove it.
The move to contact centres in the public sector was always supposed to improve the customer experience. But often all it has done is frustrate the customer. The result: wasted time and resource, disillusionment, irritation and despondency. And that’s just your contact centre staff.
Unproductive ‘chaser’ calls are not only a source of frustration all round, they’re also time-consuming and expensive. Not great when there is pressure to tighten the public purse and eradicate ‘waste’. The good news is that these calls are largely avoidable. If an organisation keeps its stakeholders informed proactively, there’s really no need for them to call, email or visit.
This proactive communication is done automatically via SMS text message, email or personalised web pages. Updates or prompts can also be generated automatically during any application process or enquiry. If key documents need to be submitted, reminders can be sent. When applications pass certain phases or approval stages, notifications are issued.
We know that in organisations where MATS® is used, chaser calls have been reduced?by 65% and complaints driven down by as much as 90%. With calls costing an average of £4.00 to just over £5.00* the financial savings are considerable. But just as critically in today’s leaner public sector, staff previously bogged down with high volumes of chaser calls can now be redeployed to more productive activities.
Peterborough City Council has used MATS® to identify which services or teams place pressure on its customer service staff. The implementation of the Call Logger within MATS® coincided with a change to weekly waste collections. The surge in incoming telephone traffic was identified as a result and an overflow direct was in place within three hours.
“What started as an NI 14 proposition?has become a strong aid to the Council’s efficiency strategy – it gives us information for meaningful conversations with back offices. The MatsSoft Call Logger is very much part of our future thinking to maintain and develop our pre-eminent position as a leading edge, efficiency focused council.”
Head of Customer Services at Peterborough City Council.
In the London Borough of Havering, MATS® has been able to deliver the first comprehensive measurement of customer service levels across the authority. Previously, big variations between how different departments and teams measured customer service meant that such a statistical overview across the organisation was virtually impossible to achieve. Now the data is informing the Borough’s strategic development.
Technology is at its smartest when it’s simple to implement and simple to use. And that’s the lowest cost way to smarter service delivery.”
Martin Scovell is Chief Executive Officer at MatsSoft®, a technology company that is revolutionising how public sector organisations are managing workflow and communication with simple, innovative and cost-effective software that quickly delivers a significant return on investment and radically improves the customer experience.
*ContactBabel 2011
