Principality Building Society was established 150 years ago and, with £7 Billion in assets, is the 6th largest building society in the UK. It is proud to be a mutual society, owned by and run for the benefit of its 500,000 customers and has 65 outlets – a network of 52 branches across Wales and 13 agency counters. The Principality is committed to providing great value and a first class service for its members and so, when it decided to seek contact centre support for its product campaigns and business continuity provision, it chose to work with a supplier with the same approach to delivering customer service.
On-demand contact centre support for top 10 building society
The Principality selected MPL Contact following a rigorous procurement exercise designed to identify an outsourced partner with the capability of providing highly flexible and scalable contact centre solutions often with very little notice. Whilst the Society has its own in-house contact centre, fluctuating call volumes generated by press coverage and partner activity means internal resources cannot cover the resulting peaks in call traffic.
Flexible, scalable outsourced service
The Society’s immediate requirements were for a Product Information Pack line, to handle hundreds of daily enquiries and supply the details captured to Principality’s fulfilment partner, and for a Best Buy information request line answering prospective customers’ queries from an evolving product knowledge base. MPL Contact agents handle all enquiries to these two lines, bypassing the in-house centre so freeing up its expert staff to manage complex customer issues.
Exception processes ensure that complaints or non-product related calls can be fast tracked for management by the Society’s own staff.
Integral Disaster Recovery Facility
In addition, the Society recognised that an integral Disaster Recovery solution would also be required to provide support in the event of the in-house contact centre being unavailable. In this situation, the outsourced agents are required to advise callers of the current situation and capture contact details for a call back once the Society’s centre is back on-line. Fortunately, this facility has not been activated but resources are required to be available to handle potentially thousands of calls in a day.
MPL Contact’s contact management technology, agent training processes and established network of UK contact centres means the services required by the Principality can be provided consistently through bureau agents, as opposed to dedicated team.
This outsourced bureau agent solution ensures best value for the Society and the same informed response to their callers at any time of day.
Business Benefits
- Able to provide consistent customer service even with fluctuating seasonal call volumes
- Integral business continuity provision from the same service provider
- Ad hoc support for the in-house contact centre with day-to-day overflow
- Complete outsourcing of information request lines frees up valuable in-house expert time
- End-to-end visibility of outsourced partner performance and sources of enquiries.
