Cumberland Building Society
Can the paperless office become a reality? One building society’s efforts provide some encouraging signs.
Over the past decade, UK Building Society Cumberland has engaged in a program of change which has earned it a leadership status for its use of technology in financial retail. The agenda has seen the society embark on an ambitious plan to transition to a completely paperless office. Whilst this journey is ongoing, invaluable lessons have been learned along the way including the improvement of work efficiencies, customer interactions and a new way of working with digital content. At its core of this revolution is the use of a Case Management System (CMS).
When considering a new CMS, the Society’s first priority was to help its over-worked Mortgage and Investment processing departments cope with the deluge of paper-based customer correspondence. The processing departments were dealing with immense volumes of communications which were being both stored - and subsequently lost - in archaic filing systems. In sum, the goal was to find a system that would help Cumberland manage its information more efficiently whilst also making it more accessible. Considering the fact that a typical mortgage application has in excess of seventy documents attached to it, and is accessed by several staff members at any one given time, it became clear that the business needed a rethink on how to make information readily available to everyone. As well as heightened visibility, the system would also need to help improve the operating efficiency and throughput of information so that overall customer satisfaction levels would improve.
Cumberland started conversations with Oceanus, a specialist UK enterprise solutions developer, to seek major productivity improvements through the automation of its paper-based customer correspondence processes. The idea was to completely eliminate the use of paper in the entire system and digitise that content.
Oceanus and Cumberland developed a CMS system which was deployed in a little under ten weeks from sign-off to live trials and operated across the two main business areas – mortgages and investments. All of the processes for the two departments were managed electronically through the new CMS and included functions such as new business processing, customer servicing, product servicing, arrears processing, information requests fulfilment and litigation and audit support.
The customer correspondence for both departments amounted to an average of around twenty thousand items per week, all of which had to be scanned and indexed through the CMS capture module in the Society’s scanning area. Once committed to CMS and stored in a central repository, the ‘work distribution engine’ would then either create a new case for the work or allocate the documents to an existing case based on pre-configured rules. This automatic allocation would see any new correspondence matched with its waiting case and a flag would be sent to alert staff to the fact that it was available for work. For new cases, these e-documents were routed to the relevant electronic work queue.
While this task of automating the capture of customer correspondence and archiving may seem simple, the process actually has saved staff hundreds of hours in time. Speaking on the difference CMS has made, Alison Muir, Head of Customer Services said: “The single most important advantage has been that our processing teams only deal with electronic documents and never need to see paper correspondence – with the exception of deeds. This has saved a significant amount of time spent on searching for paper documents or other correspondence, which may have been in use by someone else.”
“Our team has found that the ability to view customer correspondence and details on-screen instantly means that they no longer have to search through paper files on desks or in filing cabinets. The customer experience has also improved as we can retrieve information on screen rather than referring back to physical paper files and copies.”
The digitisation of content has allowed the setting up of work queues which give multiple users access to work or documents, enabling teams to distribute resources more efficiently. A diary system organises the work and can specifically assign tasks to staff to compensate for any process bottlenecks. When entering a work queue, users found that they had comprehensive views of what had happened on cases, including all correspondence sent to and from the customer, ranging from case notes to annotations. This digitisation has also had a physical impact on the amount of filing cabinets: office space occupied by the cabinets has halved.
A configurable traffic light system, the ‘Queue Status Monitor’, is used to supervise and highlight any pressures on the business. All teams have been given access to the Monitor on their desktops for the planning of workloads and priorities.
In terms of ease of use, all relevant functionality is close to hand. To respond to customers, operators simply choose the type of correspondence that they would like use, be it letter, fax or email, then select that template. The system will then populate that template with the customer’s details. However, Muir states that “We should have been more ambitious with document types and created many more. When IT first engaged with the new CMS, there was a tendency to be cautious and create just a small number of standardised templates. Over the years the standard templates have increased tenfold and we now find that the work is simplified – not complicated – by increasing the number of choices available.”
Muir continues: “Letter templates have dramatically improved our response times with the customer, while the system’s Monitor gives us a comprehensive view of business pressures. We can glance at workloads then juggle priorities in real-time. With CMS, I can see exactly who has been working on a case, how long it has taken and which tasks have been completed or not. Over the last 18 months I would say the Cumberland team has handled a 30 percent increase in work without any need for increase in headcount.”
As with all financial institutions, security measures are in place to protect the Society’s data. All users have a unique logon that gives access to functions and screens for a particular user. Access to the CMS is secured and audited to capture a log of case activity audit, investigation and compliance. The litigation team in group legal services and the audit team are supported using ‘view only’ security profiles to allow querying of CMS to find relevant case documents and logs. CMS has also made meeting financial regulations on audit trails easier. In addition, its open architecture integrates with Cumberland’s core system and automatically indexes documents, routes work and populates outgoing letters.
This transition towards a near paperless environment has taken staff just a couple of weeks to acclimatise to but Cumberland state that it did not experience any significant level of staff resistance to the new system. Muir adds that, “It seemed a little strange at first and we had anticipated a level of user-backlash to a new way of working. However, our people flew through the training and were comfortable with the system in weeks. Once they understood the amount of work that could be tracked, the accessibility they had to documents across teams in addition to the knowledge that that they would never lose anything again, there was overwhelming support. Staff - from administration through to management - appreciated the rate at which we could now do things, while customers in return appreciated the speed at which queries could be resolved.”
The paperless office may not be here just yet but the Cumberland Building Society has experienced, learned and triumphed in its own journey towards this enterprise and may yet fully deliver on the paperless dream.