Helping Skipton achieve 600% Growth in remote customer advisory meetings

For more than 160 years, Skipton Building Society has been helping people create a more secure financial future for themselves and their families. What matters to customers, matters to Skipton, and that’s why more than one million customers have come to trust the brand to help them save for their future and own their own homes.

As an award-winning provider of savings and mortgages Skipton differentiates its services by providing customers access to the right financial advice and delivering banking services with a ‘human touch:

With a network of almost 90 branches reaching from Exeter to Aberdeen, Skipton is now one of the UK’s largest building societies, but still prides itself on its commitment to remaining an empathic organisation which really listens to, and engages with, its members. Indeed, providing advice is one of Skipton’s unique selling points as a building society.

Skipton Building Society had built their success upon human connections, their challenge now was, how could they continue to provide the personal human touch to customers but via remote and digital channels?

This was critical across the range of Skipton’s customer journeys, but particularly those journeys where the engagement with an advisor was key in helping the customer achieve the best outcomes, namely mortgages and financial advice.

1. A turbulent 2020 renewed this focus as the pandemic changed the rules of how customers and financial services could engage.

2. Skipton faced the challenge of asking customers with a branch preference to use remote channels, many for the first time.

Using “Skipton Link”, a solution based on Vizolution’s video and content sharing capabilities, it no longer matters where the customer or financial advisor are based.

The flexibility which Skipton Link gives the advisor means productivity and utilisation has significantly increased while maintaining a strong CSAT level.

1. Skipton Link enables branch staff to deal with day-to-day customer queries remotely while delivering exceptional face to face customer meetings, remotely.

2. Customers can now meet face to face with branch staff over video and are able to exchange documents without having to send and receive them in the mail.

3. This speeds up the process and maintains the human touch – both important criteria to maintaining high standards of customer service.

Having successfully transformed their business overnight, Skipton is now in a position to offer a Remote Branch, enabling all branch services to be provided digitally. Many of Skipton’s older demographic customers still prefer going into branch but during the pandemic found they could take advantage of Skipton’s online services.

Skipton are finding that their older customer demographic is ‘getting younger – the uptake of digital services by the older generation has been very positive, with great feedback.

Skipton have also implemented a ‘Paperless’ initiative, with the goal of helping their 1 million customers go paperless by the end of 2022. In support of this initiative Skipton are considering implementing Vizolution’s self-service capabilities to automate document exchange and support identity verification and signatures digitally, reducing the need for paper and helping the environment.