Capita: Pioneering partnerships

Capita helps a leading provider of vehicle finance manage growth and improve customer experience, providing it with a service that is cost-effective and efficient, and delivers exceptional quality of service.

Capita is a leading provider of vehicle finance within the UK market and is owned by a major global car manufacturer. The UK is part of a wider European operation that spans a number of countries. As a captive finance provider, it only provides loans on vehicle brands owned by its parent company.

Its business is split into two parts. First, it provides retail car finance for individuals seeking car finance. The second part is the wholesale market, where finance is provided to dealers stocking vehicles.

The car industry has been impacted by the economic environment of recent years. The significant growth the organisation was seeing before this time did slow, but through careful stewardship of its business, Capita has fared well throughout and is once again seeing strong growth in lending.

The challenge and solution

The partnership, which spans more than eight years, provides customer service, customer relations and early-stage collections to the retail finance operation. Capita was selected as a partner that could deliver the requirements of excellent quality of service, flexible resources, technological innovation and good value for money - achieving more for less.

Capita's solution was to set up an insourced operation at its client's primary UK processing site at Treforest, outside Cardiff, Wales. Capita manages the operation of 60 advisers alongside other in-house client operations on this site. The partnership has continued to evolve to ensure ongoing delivery for the client and its customers. Through strong governance, and an open and honest relationship, there have been many shared successes. Key initiatives to deliver these have included:

Revised KPI metrics and introduction of a risk and reward scorecard that reflects the client's key drivers. Both have a biannual mechanism to review and set stretch targets to ensure continued performance improvement.
An increased focus on staff development, behavioural and technical skills. This includes the introduction of a learning development officer role, introduction of a training and competency scheme, a review of all call standards and the introduction of NVQs for staff that wish to study, all supporting the key client focus of 'delighting the customer'.
Introduction of a 'soft' dialler solution to improve delinquency within collections allowing the unit to deal with more accounts while keeping headcount at the same level. This has also been used for conducting the satisfaction survey introduction of Auto Pay, a 24/7 automated payments portal that allows customers to make payments outside of normal opening hours. Advisers can also route calls into Auto Pay to ensure 100% PCI compliance.
Outbound SMS to encourage inbound contact for those with overdue payments.
Operational flexibility to ensure optimised staffing levels to meet the ever-changing customer call demand.

The service continues to develop, and a number of new initiatives providing further benefits are to be embedded. These include linking the dialler and SMS to the Auto Pay systems to reduce inbound calls to the early-stage collections team, using insight and technology to improve current best-time-to-call analysis, and improved interactive voice solutions for customer satisfaction surveys.

The results

The length of the partnership and strong ongoing relationship are testimony to the successes that has been jointly achieved. By continuing to innovate through operational best practice, staff development and use of technology, key benefits have been achieved:

strong KPI delivery, with 100% KPI delivery achieved over a 12-month period, and the delinquency level currently at the lowest it has ever been, which is particularly impressive following the economic pressures over the past few years
the introduction of the Auto Pay portal resulted in a reduction of more than 4,000 payment calls to agents in a 12-month period, with callers using the automated system
alongside PCI compliance, when an agent passes a caller through to Auto Pay to make a payment, it has reduced the call length by 50 seconds.
winner of the VQ Award for NVQ training, and finalists in the Credit Today and Welsh Contact Centre Awards.