Provide high-touch customer service built on high-tech solutions.
Done.
Nationwide Building Society chose Unisys Appointment Manager solution to centralise and streamline booking and confirmation processes. As a result, the Society has improved its ability to respond quickly and effectively to customer inquiries and requests for meetings while maximising utilisation of personnel and facility resources.
Metrics
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Resource optimisation: Reduced “no shows” by 50% and appointment cancellation rates by 4%
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Enhanced customer service: Ability to schedule in-branch customer appointments two days earlier
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Growth: Scalable solution supporting scheduling of 18,000 appointments per week from Nationwide’s contact centre and more than 900 locations (branches and agencies)
Business Challenge:
Maximising Customer Service and Resource UtilisationWith a goal of increasing its overall market share of the UK retail savings and residential mortgage markets, Nationwide Building Society must make each and every customer experience a positive one. This is particularly important when a customer seeks a one-on-one meeting with a financial adviser, because such critical touch-points offer Nationwide the opportunity to reinforce its position of trust and opens door for selling additional services.
The building society has a substantial investment in a centralised contact centre, Nationwide Direct, which serves customers over the phone and makes referrals to branch offices. Time is money – particularly in the competitive retail mortgage industry – and Nationwide must optimise the time and talents of its personnel. But the organisation feared it was losing business because of an inability to identify “best fit” resources for customers.
“Keeping customers happy is prime to our business proposition,” notes Steve Heyes, IT Project Manager for Nationwide. “We recognised that being able to book appointments efficiently and offer customers times and locations that suited their needs was the next logical step in improving the customer experience. Our no-show rates for booked appointments were unacceptable, as well. It’s a vicious circle – you cannot see people sooner because you were booked waiting for a customer that isn’t going to show up.”
Nationwide has long recognised the value technology offers in terms of improving customer service and making employees more productive. Therefore, it was natural for the Society to look for ways to create an automated, centralised booking application.
“We find Unisys Appointment Manager to be very low maintenance compared to many of our other systems. It’s robust and very rarely goes wrong – and even when it does, that’s nearly always been user induced. It’s spot on in terms of its availability.”
Steve Heyes
IT Project Manager
Nationwide Building Society
Solution:
Unisys Appointment Manager Improves Productivity and ServiceNationwide considered several alternatives, including using Microsoft Exchange. However Exchange lacked the required scalability and would have needed changes to its front-end application, Microsoft Outlook. Nationwide weighed the remaining options and selected a solution from Unisys.
“Unisys Appointment Manager has a niche in the financial services market as a proven solution and has been deployed in organisations much larger than ours, so the scalability was there,” says Steve Heyes. “With Appointment Manager, we were able to get to market very quickly.”
A web-based solution, Appointment Manager provides functions to create, present and manage appointments across all channels within Nationwide. Running over the Society’s Intranet, the solution enables contact centre or branch location personnel to search for and successfully book an appointment based on the customer’s requirements. The resulting booking is then placed into the appropriate resource diary, be it an adviser or room, all while the customer is on the telephone.
Once booked, the appointment is confirmed with the customer by letter or email. And to help reduce the incidence of no-shows, a reminder can be despatched by email or text message at an appropriate time prior to the appointment.
Because Appointment Manager was to become a fundamental part of Nationwide’s customer management strategy, Unisys developed interfaces to share data between the Society’s customer management system, advisers’ Outlook calendars and other reference databases. This integration minimises the need to collect and re-key information that Nationwide already has on record, such as primary customer details, determination of their nearest branches and the likely appointment type.
What’s more, the integration of Appointment Manager with Exchange allows Nationwide to preserve and further leverage its current investment in Microsoft technology. Together, they represent a powerful combination that further improves employee productivity and customer service.
The Appointment Manager deployment was conducted in phases. An initial pilot with 20 branch locations and the call centre ran for 9 months. This limited production rollout proved invaluable in ensuring seamless integration of the Appointment Manager solution with Nationwide’s other core applications. Once the solution was proven, Appointment Manager was rolled out to the rest of the Society at a rate of 50 branches per week.
“Unisys provided a project team of very experienced technical people who had excellent integration and architectural skills. Unisys provided a total software and services package that made the deployment of Appointment Manager a success.”
Steve Heyes
IT Project Manager
Nationwide Building Society
Results:
Convenient, Courteous, Competent Customer ServiceThanks in large part to Unisys Appointment Manager, Nationwide Building Society has streamlined and optimised critical customer-facing processes. At the same time, Nationwide has seen some remarkable results, including:
- Booking of 18,000 appointments per week from both the contact centre and branch office locations
- No-shows decreased by 50 per cent through the use of automated confirmation and reminders via email and text messaging
- Appointments conducted nearly 2 days earlier by presenting “first available” slots across multiple branches
- Cancellation rates reduced by 4 per cent by matching a customer’s specific service needs and timeframe to the nearest branch office and financial adviser
Improved management information is another benefit of Appointment Manager. Nationwide now has visibility into a number of data points, including appointments booked, who books them, who they are booked with, how long the customer waits to see someone, did the customer turn up or cancel and what was sold as a result of an appointment. The Society plans to use this information to help with long-term decision-making.
“We collect the data on a daily basis,” says Steve Heyes. “The next step will be to mix-and-match the information to paint a complete picture. For example, we can encourage branches to offer business to other locations and then give them credit for doing so.”
The Relationship:
Respect and PartnershipUnisys and Nationwide have built a strong relationship based on mutual respect and collaboration. “Unisys is open and honest and we trust them to work with Nationwide as a partner,” says Steve Heyes. “Unisys was as committed as we were to making the Appointment Manager deployment a success.”
Profile: Nationwide Building Society
- Headquartered in Swindon, United Kingdom
- Largest building society in the world, measured by total assets
- 14 million customers served through more than 900 branch locations
- Mutual organisation owned and managed for the benefit of its members
- Nationwide’s core business is providing personal financial services, including savings, residential mortgages, general retail banking, personal investment products, insurance and offshore deposit-taking, as well as commercial lending and treasury
Solution at a Glance
- Unisys Appointment Manager
- Technical consulting services, including business analysis, development, integration, deployment and maintenance
