A Digital Drive Towards Greater CX

Fast, agile development in low-code enables The West Brom Building Society to deliver improved customer experience

The challenge

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 their interest rate. Off the back of the success of the savings portal, The 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.

Faster development keeps the building society in control

They looked to our low-code platform, Liberty Create, with an initial project to digitise the application process for new savings accounts. 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. This application is called ‘Apply’.

“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 have 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.”

Matthew Hunt

Senior Technical Operations Manager, The West Brom Building Society

The solution

“Mentoring works perfectly for our teams. Our mentors are brilliant and on a 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.”

Matthew Hunt

Senior Technical Operations Manager, The West Brom Building Society

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.
A future full of potential

The West Brom are in an exciting stage of their digitisation processes. Their approach takes three phases:

  • Developing improvements to the customer journey
  • External integrations that streamline customer processes
  • Internal process improvement and automation.

At this early stage of their development, they are already realising substantial benefits. The West Brom is now able to move forward, making further improvements with integrations and internal processes to enhance customer experience. And they can use their own team to build it, with no additional costs or restrictions, using Liberty Create.

This article also features in Financial Reporter.

Impact

29% reduced

admin time in opening new accounts

Full control

over all processes

Fast

time to market for new applications

Building applications. Fast.

Here’s how you can implement a large-scale drive for operational excellence.

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