Alliance & Leicester International
Improving customer service and planning for the future
Alliance & Leicester International Limited (ALIL) is an international bank which provides banking services to high net worth individuals requiring offshore savings accounts. To help the customer services department manage the company’s plan to more than double in size, ALIL purchased CMS (Case Management Solution) from Oceanus.
ALIL needed a solution for their customer services department that would:
- Reduce the work required to process customer requests
- Capture and route the different types of correspondence (email, fax, web form and letter)
- Enable customer telephone requests to be resolved immediately
- Be implemented within a rapid timescale
- Provide a quick return on investment
- Integrate with their core financial systems
- Allocate staff resources more efficiently
- Allow them to reclaim the office space taken by the paper store
- Improve the links between the front and back office functions
- Allow their historic customer documents to be incorporated
Speed of deployment was an important factor in the purchasing decision. CMS ‘went live’ and was in use within 11 weeks of the decision to buy. Close involvement of the team at all stages meant the right system was delivered first time. ALIL found that Phase 1 implementation of CMS was very straightforward. The entire team quickly became familiar with the new, more efficient processes and the new ways of working that are possible with CMS. Much of the day to day management and modification of the system can be handled by ALIL’s own staff through simple windows configuration tools.
Work management
Work is delivered through process control to shared work queues. Each customer service advisor has a profile that controls the queues and functions they work with. The queue monitoring tools allow the supervisors to see exactly how much work is in the system and thus direct each member of their team to respond to the priorities required.
Rapid responses
Responding to customer calls used to mean having to find the paper file and then call the customer back. Now the customer service advisors can instantly retrieve the customer’s details electronically and process their request.
Letter production
Before CMS, the contents of customer letters had to be manually edited and checked by supervisors. The labour reducing features of CMS mean that customer service advisors can produce letters using predefined templates which are automatically populated with data like address, salutation and signature from their core financial system. Most of the letters require no customer service advisor input, just printing and sending.
One view of the customer
Most of the structured (core financial system) and unstructured (document) customer data is integrated into a single screen in a single application, thus giving the customer service advisors fast and efficient access to customer information.
Management information & reporting
Statistics collection used to involve each member of staff saving their own records and then the supervisor collating these and producing reports. Now, all the data is collected automatically by CMS and the tailored reports are produced by selecting the report and the data ranges required.
Compliance
Checklists within the CMS desktop are defined and maintained by ALIL to ensure that where necessary cases follow prescribed, auditable processes, ensuring compliance with the regulatory framework.
Existing documents
Tens of thousands of existing paper documents were captured and made available online to ALIL users. The space this paper occupied was reclaimed to allow for the expansion of the customer services team and the business.
Audit
The supervisors need to be able to easily check the application of ALIL procedures on work. CMS automatically collects this information through integrated case audit and history functionality. With the appropriate security granted, the supervisors can view and report on this information.
Efficient customer interaction
CMS, combines all channels of customer correspondence and associated information into a single case based interface, allowing the capture, processing, resolution and management of customer interactions. This enables organisations to exploit more efficient communication channels and process improvements to reduce the ‘Cost to manage’ of customer interactions. CMS fits easily and quickly into an organisations infrastructure and delivers results immediately.
Efficient system management
Oceanus are reducing cost and risk, and improving efficiency for our customers by offering the ‘Environment management’ of IBM FileNet, CMS, and dependent 3rd party software and hardware environments. Through a mix of on-site and off-site services we are reducing, or removing, our customers’ need to recruit, manage, maintain and retain the specialist staff required to manage their environments e.g. Operating system, database and IBM FileNet Certified Professional trained specialists.
Enterprise Work Processing
CMS does not replace the key systems within ALIL, but instead leverages these systems and links them with Case management, Content management and Process management. CMS drives the work through the business and integrates directly and indirectly to other systems. This best of breed approach leverages existing point solutions without the costs or upgrade limitations of Enterprise Application Integration.
CMS can adapt to almost any environment because to support different point solutions it is not the core code that changes, it’s the configurations. In short, CMS provides an inter-site, inter-system, inter-department work management layer with:
- A logical case based work model
- Secure, fast, simultaneous access to interactions
- Real-time business activity monitoring and reports
- Process management & audit for compliance
- Rapid reactivity to current business needs