Nationwide and tsys switch to worksmart to improve complaints efficiency

Nationwide and tsys switch to worksmart to improve complaints efficiency

In the first quarter of 2008, the World’s biggest building society, Nationwide appointed US-based payments processor TSYS, to handle its credit card account portfolio and to build, operate and manage a new customer care centre for member support services. The TSYS contract services more than one million Visa accounts and employs 300 agents at its customer care centre in Coventry.

By working with TSYS, Nationwide has been able to offer its customers enhanced products and processes while providing greater member value through annual saving costs. However, within weeks of going live, problems with the complaints handling system – handled via an internal system – became apparent. Issues with a lack of functionality and performance, such as no search facility and no real case management caused problems operationally. This system was stopped and interim processes put in place, however, the organisations needed to work together to quickly find a replacement system to resolve these issues.

A set of success criteria was developed that the new complaints handling system needed to address. For example; reduce the reaction and response time to complaints, reduce the number of manual errors, provide extensive reporting, improve the number of first time resolutions of a complaint within five days and reduce the number of breaches caused by the complaints team. In January 2009, Worksmart’s Caresmart product was the chosen solution.

Richard Pawlyn, chief executive of Worksmart, explains the implementation process: “Worksmart worked closely with TSYS and Nationwide to understand the problems within their existing processes and how the existing systems were failing their businesses. Our Caresmart product can be adapted to fit into any current business process therefore over the course of January 2009, a number of workshops were conducted to establish the required workflow that would need to be built into the system to accommodate TSYS’s complaints team and structure. These workshops were supported by a ‘Solution Design Document’ which would, by the end of the project, act as TSYS’s in-house training material.”

Worksmart identified  six key improvements – genuine case management, letter generation to allow TSYS the ability to produce letters directly from the system, root cause analysis, the implementation of postcode software, a data dictionary supported by report writing, and once designed, the delivery of extensive user acceptance testing and end user training.

Since its roll out in May 2009, the Caresmart product has provided TSYS and Nationwide with significant improvements.

Within weeks, it became apparent that significant benefits were being gained. For example, letter templates created by TSYS and held within Caresmart allowed TSYS to improve the letter generation efficiency and eliminate additional costs. The new postcode software helped reduce input times and address errors. The case management functionality helped reduced the average age of a complaint before resolution from 14 days to 6.5 days. The new reporting functionality, which allows the TSYS management team to generate their own ‘real-time’ reporting from the system, ensures the effective monitoring of those processes. All these factors contributed to improving response times from 22 to 4 minutes and improving first time resolution within five days of receipt of a complaint from 13% to around 40%.  These results far exceeded expectations.

And with only two cosmetic issues identified during the user acceptance testing, the system was fully functional in just three weeks.

Phil Cooper, IT and project consultant to Nationwide and TSYS said: “The Worksmart project was delivered to time and budget.  Most importantly the quality of the software delivered was very good, requiring only three weeks of extensive ‘User Acceptance Testing’, this combined with excellent turnaround and quality of software defects, enabled the solution to be implemented with only two very minor defects open and these were closed within a couple of days.  I have been involved in many system conversions and implementations and it’s been a long time since I have seen a solution requiring significant development go live with so few defects.  Best of all users love the new system.  Well done Worksmart!”

As the design of the delivered Caresmart system was intuitive and supported TSYS’s existing processes, end users required minimal training; therefore, it has provided a significant result of which breaches within the complaints team have been eradicated. 

TSYS is currently in discussion with Worksmart about further project work.