The Challenge
Alliance & Leicester is one the UK’s leading financial services groups and most recognised financial brands.
It has been a member of the FTSE 100 since 1997, when it converted from a mutual building society to a bank and offers a wide range of award-winning financial services to personal and business customers.
Within its retail banking operation, Alliance & Leicester has 1.64 million active current
accounts. Staff handle millions of sales calls and inquiries to the bank every year.
Handling these calls within the current accounts and savings business area are teams
based in Ashford, Leeds, Bootle and Leicester.
These operations deliver 24-hour customer service and sales advice via telephone and internet
banking channels. Supporting the front-line teams is the bank’s back office operations which
process the work.
Customer services manager Julie Armstrong is based in Bootle and manages four teams of
more than 70 staff. They handle a host of key activities and each individual activity needs to be
monitored to return valuable management information.
She explains, “The focus at Alliance & Leicester is on raising the performance bar to exceed
customer expectations. We need to see and understand our performance levels and record
accurate metrics in order to see how we can improve.” The Solution
Alliance & Leicester is a long standing customer of Nuqleus from XTAQ. As a business process management tool, Nuqleus gathers information on work activities and provides comprehensive insight into the performance of an operation through detailed measurement of processes and productivity.
 The information helps build capacity plans to ensure that the right level of resource is in place at the right time and to help maintain service levels.
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Following a restructure, Alliance & Leicester started using Nuqleus to record timesheet information. Staff on flexi-time were using a paper-based system to book in and out.
By replacing it with Nuqleus, Alliance & Leicester eased the administrative burden of collating information from the paper system and also helped improve the accuracy of the data.
The use of Nuqleus was expanded to record annual leave and sickness, again replacing a paper and spreadsheet system.
Rachel Donnachie is the primary Nuqleus resource within the team. She explains, “By recording all leave and sickness on Nuqleus we get a more accurate picture and can monitor trends.”
The information helps build capacity plans to ensure that the right level of resource is in place at the right time and to help maintain service levels.”
The automation of data collection in this way saves time for team leaders and co-ordinators, helping release staff from mundane tasks to focus on more strategic, value-adding roles.
Nuqleus Benefits
Nuqleus is also used across the company’s back office. It records all the work being received and processed by teams in Bootle and Leicester. Nuqleus ensures all work is recorded, right down to individual activities.
Paula Dempsey, a team leader based in Bootle describes the value of this, “Some tasks are given batch timings and some are individual pieces managed by unique numbers. Nuqleus records each activity independently, whether it’s a batch or single. These can still be aggregated into batches and into top-level management information, but the base data is the individual pieces of processed work. This gives us a more accurate picture of the workload, and we can see how long a piece of work takes to process.”
The customer service operation benefits from knowing how much resource is needed at different times to handle different workloads. The workforce sees Nuqleus as a key tool. It takes a few seconds to log in at the start of the day and the monitoring goes on unobtrusively in the background.
Paula adds, “I can measure my team members’ task efficiency each day. I can see if someone’s had a very high day and break down the tasks they have done. Likewise, I can see if someone’s not had a high day, it could signal that they need more training or if some other issues are at play. It returns very useful management information.”
Information supplied by Nuqleus is also used by employees in their staff appraisals. Customer services manager Julie Armstrong values this, “We can drill down into the data with users at evaluation and other times. Nuqleus also provides information that users can see themselves and check their own performance. They appreciate this and it helps them use Nuqleus effectively.”
Valued Management Information
The management information Nuqleus provides is valued across the organisation. Senior management appreciate the product’s Dashboard feature – which gives a high-level snapshot of what is happening, where results are against targets, how many pieces of work are processed on a daily, weekly, monthly basis.
As Julie Armstrong says, “This is an invaluable tool. We can make adjustments, retrain people or change processes to improve performance and productivity.”
It’s not very admin-demanding, and the information it returns has been used to make significant improvements to the business as a whole.
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The speed and ease with which Nuqleus can start delivering value is highlighted by Rachel Donnachie, as the key Nuqleus resource for the whole organisation.
“It’s not very admin-demanding,” she says, “And the information it returns has been used to make significant improvements to the business as a whole.”
Nuqleus is really coming into its own within Alliance & Leicester. As it provides more answers, so management have more questions. Rachel Donnachie is enthusiastic about pushing the boundaries of what Nuqleus can do: “Now that we’ve learnt what Nuqleus can really deliver, we can think of more applications for it,” she says.
For example, Nuqleus has been installed to handle overtime working hours. Everyone working overtime, logs into Nuqleus, which maintains an accurate and accessible record.
The applications for Nuqleus within Alliance & Leicester will no doubt continue to expand - and continue to deliver value.
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