Marsden building society deploys UCaaS to enhance employee, customer experiences

Lancashire’s largest building society, The Marsden, has enhanced its existing communications and collaboration infrastructure with a cloud-based unified communications as a service offering that is agile, flexible and scalable enough to support its immediate needs and long-term growth.

The Marsden began life in Nelson, Lancashire on 29 February 1860, as the Great and Little Marsden Permanent Benefit Building Society. It currently offers a basket of financial services covering savings, mortgages and home insurance, and employs more than 100 people across eight branches and its principal office.

Yet the business requirements of financial services companies are changing, and strategic digital transformation initiatives have been accelerated for many by the pandemic experiences of the past two years.

Following a full review of its existing communications systems, The Marsden concluded that its 15-year-old on-premise IP phone system had reached end of life. The company needed a modern, flexible service to meet its current needs while allowing for growth, as well as providing employees with a flexible remote working option and business continuity in the face of unexpected global events.

The Marsden selected Avaya Cloud Office by RingCentral for its ability to host and record customer video calls, as well as store and manage detailed historical data for reporting purposes in a fully secure cloud environment that is compliant to the building society’s regulatory requirements.

The single platform all-in-one cloud communication offering with enhanced redundancy provides multiple communication channels for 100 users across all branches of The Marsden and for remote working. It also enables full visibility of calls for senior management, and was chosen for the simplicity of its administration and technical support, with dedicated customer service management and guaranteed SLAs to 99.999%.

Avaya ecosystem partner P&C Communications recommended Avaya Cloud Office as a cloud-hosted offering to meet The Marsden’s needs. After a review of the competitive options, it received a project-managed migration of its communications service from on-premise to the cloud from P&C Communications.

As well as meeting all core requirements, Avaya Cloud Office was also said to have had the advantage of allowing complimentary cloud-based integrations, including RSI Shadow Analytics, which allow detailed call reporting and real-time notifications to supplement the recording and long-term storage needs of the building society.

Cloud Office also enables the addition of new features that may be desired in the future, allowing, said Avaya, The Marsden to adapt to any new business or compliance requirements through changes in its central configuration or the introduction of new application plug-ins.

“Avaya Cloud Office provides us with a flexible and resilient telephony solution,” said Brian Morrison, head of business change and IT at The Marsden Building Society.

“Administration, including producing management information, has been found to be straightforward. Since implementation, our users have provided lots of positive feedback – they like the system and find it intuitive to use.”

Steve Joyner, Avaya vice-president for UK&I, said: “The employee experience and customer experience are inextricably linked, and both should be as effortless as possible so that everyone can get on with doing their job well. It’s great to see The Marsden empower its employees … so they can move forward into the dynamic and collaborative new world of work with a communications technology platform.”