The West Brom is a mutual building society, established over 170 years ago. It remains focused on helping over 400,000 members with mortgages and savings. A primary focus is to try and promote home ownership where possible and a large proportion of their customer base is first time buyers.
The West Brom is always looking to improve customer experience and respond to feedback from customers. When customers were requesting digital, 24/7 access to their accounts, The West Brom built a basic portal using traditional code, enabling customers to view their account information online, such as account balances and interest rates. Off the back of the success of the savings portal, West Brom saw the opportunity to appeal to new markets and demographics by enhancing customer journeys online. However, they recognised that they would need to move much faster with development.
The solution
The West Brom wanted to offer a fully digital journey, where new and existing customers could apply for a new account without the need to fill in paper forms sent by post or taken into a branch, as well as enabling customers to apply 24/7.
Netcall created an application called ‘Apply’ with their low-code platform, Liberty Create, to digitise the application process for new savings accounts. The new platform Netcall created also helped:
· Train and build with a mentor
· Vital integrations
· Scalability for future development
· A marketing edge
· Getting the leadership on board
Matthew Hunt, Senior Technical Operations Manager at The West Brom Building Society, comments: “The biggest appeal of low-code is speed. We can get proof of concepts spun up and working very, very quickly – within a matter of days. We can sit down for two days, build proof concepts in a sandbox environment and either have something to move forward with or something to help guide future decisions without a lot of time wasted. It gives us the capability to explore ideas and options with little upfront investment in time.”
“Mentoring works perfectly for our teams. Our mentors are brilliant and on call whenever we need them – we’ve rarely waited longer than half a day for them to provide support. Our learning curve has been so much quicker thanks to the mentoring and the team are quickly becoming ‘experts’ themselves thanks to this approach.”
Richard Higginbotham, Product Marketing – Intelligent Automation at Netcall, adds: “The West Brom – like a lot of our clients – face a growing demand to provide digital products and services. It’s great to help them meet the increasing expectations of their customers. Providing the capability for them to deliver faster using our low-code development platform, Liberty Create, means they’ve been able to achieve significant efficiencies and accelerate their speed to market.”
The result
· Staff processing has reduced by 4 minutes per account opening and upcoming enhancements are set to reduce this again by half.
· Fast time to market for new applications which modernise, digitise and improve the customer experience.
· Changing mindsets: the ability to try something without committing thousands of pounds has enabled more ideas and an experimental approach to see what works for customers and for the building society.
· Flexibility to introduce new products quickly.
· Further opportunities identified using Liberty Create to develop a tenant portal to manage tenant repairs and communications.
Find out more here: https://www.netcall.com/customers/the-west-brom-a-digital-drive-towards-greater-cx/