Building in efficiency, customer experience and scalability
Project highlights at a glance
- Customers can exert improved flexibility and control of their account balances
- Adherence to new banking regulations
- Enhanced automated and ad-hoc customer communication
- Successfully enforced SLAs/guarantees
- Able to on-board more customers, cost effectively
- Automating communications with customers via text message
- Streamlining processes and scaling operations
- Real-time management information
- Improved customer satisfaction
- Significant unit cost reduction
- Rapid implementation and deployment of project
Powering mobile banking alerts
Personalising mobile banking alerts
For many years, Nationwide has offered a free SMS messaging service that sends customers information such as their current account balance and the last five transactions. As consumer needs and expectations continued to change, they wanted to ensure greater transparency and control of their communications. They wanted to empower customers to personalise their alert preferences.
Digital transformation in financial services
Nationwide has been on a digital transformation journey for many years, using Netcall solutions to build low-code for banking apps and systems. They already had the capability to allow customers to sign up to receive balance alerts and details of their last five transactions. It was quite easy to enhance the Liberty Create solution, enabling customers to opt to in to additional messages, providing alerts when the balance reaches a certain limit. These alerts and rules set by the customer, give additional control and flexibility. This also corresponded with changes to banking regulations.
- 24 hour access is available to online banking customers. This saves Nationwide time and effort to control the system
- Registration is available through the customer’s local branch, online banking or a Nationwide contact centre
- Create allows integration between low-code and banking systems, including SAP and Unisys banking platforms
- It allows for generic messages to be sent to customers when required.
Giving control to customers
Nationwide customers now have greater flexibility and control of their account balances. The specific advantages include:
- Customers are notified when transactions take their balance above or below their preferred limit
- Customers have better control of their account balance.
“We believe this is the sort of clear and transparent information that every provider should be giving their customers.”
— Richard Marriott, Head of Savings, Nationwide Building Society
Account switching made easy
Overcoming reluctance to switch accounts
Switching bank accounts, and informing every company that you have a direct debit with, is annoying. So, unsurprisingly, customers are reluctant to switch bank accounts. However, this was an important element of Nationwide’s growth plan.
To tempt customers, they had an Account Switch guarantee which promised £100 compensation if Nationwide didn’t successfully contact all of a new customer’s direct debit companies within 10 days. If there were any transfer errors, they would also cover the related overdraft charges and interest for up to three months.
The challenge for Nationwide, was ensuring their Account Switch process was slick and error proof. If they met these service level guarantees, they didn’t have to pay any compensation. Happy customers and cost effectiveness are one and the same thing.
Deploying highly successful systems
Nationwide had deployed many highly successful systems using Liberty Create, including Mortgages, ISAs, Bereavements and Complaints. The Account Switching unit applied a similar approach using Liberty Create.
Netcall helped the Account Switching unit to map out an improved process and deploy a Liberty Create solution built in low-code for banking use. In just a few weeks.
With the new capability, Nationwide is able to:
- Track and monitor customer transfer applications based on service level agreements
- Provide automated customer updates at key stages via text message
- Ensure critical diarised actions are logged and scheduled at the right time
- Carry out proactive checks, in good time, to provide management with real-time reporting on pipeline status.
“We received excellent support from the Netcall team, whose agile approach to development has allowed us to deploy these changes swiftly.”
— Head of Current Accounts
Generated a 79% increase in account switches
Nationwide is now able to on-board more customers cost-effectively. In the year that the system was introduced, a 79% increase in account switches was reported. Plus, the new solution allowed them to:
- Manage SLAs
- Provide a guaranteed service
- Improve management information
- Automate communications with customers by text message during the account switch process
- Workflow and workload balancing across the customer service team
- On-board more customers cost-effectively
- Build upon their strategy for digital transformation in financial services.
Scaling up ISA processing
Streamlining for efficiency, customer experience and scalability
When the global financial crisis erupted in 2008, there was an upsurge in the creation of new ISAs, as people moved savings in and out of various banks and building societies. Not surprisingly this led to poor service, as processing teams were unable to cope with increased work volumes.
This led to a consequent surge in chaser phone calls and customer complaints. This accumulated in poor customer experience, bad PR, compensation claims and even fines and sanctions. This backdrop led Nationwide to overhaul and streamline their ISA processing function. And all of this in the backdrop of digital transformation in the financial services sector.
They needed a workflow solution to streamline the application process. They needed real-time management information to enable superior caseload monitoring to meet SLAs. And it must improve and automate customer communications to dramatically improve customer experience and reduce inbound chaser phone call. All of this would make the operation more efficient and scalable.
Specified and built within 8 weeks
A system for ISA processing was specified and built in Liberty Create within an eight-week period. This can handle any volume of new ISA accounts, transfers in and out of existing ISAs and consolidations.
It also offers a full suite of real-time management information, active workflow dashboards and proactive communications to notify customers, as things happen. It also provides:
- 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
- Visibility of which banks and building societies are requesting transfers
- Intelligence of where new customers are moving their money from
Significant operational cost reduction
Nationwide is now one of the UK’s top ISA providers by volume and value. At peak volumes, the Liberty Create solution helps Nationwide to successfully process over 100,000 ISA applications per week. This is low-code for banking in action!
Nationwide has achieved significant efficiency gains and cost savings since the implementation. Crucially, they have achieved excellent customer satisfaction ratings from the same system.
“Create has made a telling contribution to Nationwide achieving its best ever ISA peak performance. The society processed record levels of ISA business.”
— Head of ISA Processing, Nationwide Building Society
Read how other areas of Nationwide are benefiting from Liberty Create to deliver award-winning customer service.
Learn more about how we help financial organisations
