Tandem Bank disrupts the market with real-time digital services

When Tandem Bank burst onto the UK market in 2015 it had a vision of a new customer-centric approach to banking that creates lifetime value to customers and shareholders alike.

Following the acquisition of green loans company, Allium, this challenger bank now also has the opportunity to blaze a trail towards a greener future, where financial security and environmental sustainability are realised, quite literally, in tandem. For example, green loans help customers finance energy saving improvements to their homes.

“By offering customers fast and seamless omnichannel services we can grow our market share and fund more green initiatives at the same time,” said Derek Usher, Chief Operating Officer at Tandem Bank. “Salesforce supports sustainable growth so we can tap into society’s increasing desire for more ethical banking.”

Tandem has around 60,000 active customers and is growing fast. It offers a range of services including green instant access saver accounts, fixed term savings accounts, mortgages, and loans. One of the UK’s first wholly digital banks, it interacts with customers via a UK-based call centre five days a week, through live chat and by email.

“Customers want service to be instant and super-efficient,” said Usher. “We needed an agile and scalable platform so we can meet those demands and adapt to face the challenges of tomorrow.”

The bank went to market in 2018, looking for a best-of-breed solution with strong out-of-the-box functionality. It selected Salesforce, and it hasn’t looked back since.

“Salesforce gives us 360-degree visibility of every customer across every channel in real-time, which is crucial to give them the most accurate and up-to-date information on their payment history and balance,” explained Raj Sidhu, Business Systems & Processes Manager at Tandem Bank. “A lot of banks struggle with latency issues, so real time access to data in Salesforce was a real win for our business.”

The platform is comprised of Service Cloud, Live Agent, Sales Cloud, and Salesforce Connect, which facilitates the vital flow of data across the organisation in real time. It’s also integrated with Talkdesk, a telephony solution from Salesforce AppExchange that gives customers a seamless experience across all channels.

The team worked closely with Salesforce to implement the solution and adapt it to meet the bank’s needs. Tandem is also on the Premier Success Plan for ongoing support.

“Salesforce understands our challenges and is invested in helping us achieve our goals,” said Nikunj Lukka, Head of Business Systems & Processes. “The partnership was crucial to the success of our implementation and will be invaluable as we face new challenges and expand our offering.”

Today, when a customer reaches out to Tandem, they can expect the same fast and responsive service across all channels. Manual case handling has been replaced with automatic workflows that route tickets to the next available agent. In the case of live chat, this has slashed average response times from 13 minutes to an incredible 12 seconds and simplifies the bank’s approach to support.

Using the Service Cloud console, agents have full visibility of the customer’s history, and Salesforce Connect populates it with real-time data. “Because of the high volume of transactions, most banks simply can’t support the level of insight we get with Salesforce,” explained Sidhu. “Where they have to wait hours or days for the system to refresh via batch processing, we can see the customer’s latest interactions and balance in seconds, which means we can help them there and then.”

In an industry where even a five-minute delay could result in a poor customer experience, this is particularly useful for building strong, lifelong relationships based on trust.

“Reimagining the customer experience with our previous solution would’ve been unthinkable,” commented Lukka. “Our spaghetti architecture was fragmented, data was in silos, and teams had to flick between eight different systems with no unified view of the customer. Salesforce gives us the flexibility to protect the agent and customer experience without compromising on technical integrity.”

Centralised data and smarter processes haven’t just slashed response times, they’ve also improved staff and customer satisfaction while boosting operational efficiency and scalability – all without having to do a single bit of coding. This is not only more cost effective, but it has also increased the bank’s resiliency, which was about to be severely tested.

Not long after Tandem’s Salesforce rollout, the world was struck by the COVID-19 pandemic, and businesses had to pivot rapidly to working from home. While traditional banks struggled to scale up their call centres to cope with rapidly spiking volumes of cases, Tandem seamlessly adapted to remote working in just 48 hours and handled 38% more cases in March 2020.

“Our team could simply log into Salesforce from home and still have real-time 360-degree visibility of the customer across multiple channels, in addition to zero disruption to services,” said Lukka. “The transition went so well we’re considering adopting a hybrid working model to increase employee satisfaction and implementing long-term remote working strategies.”

With Salesforce, it’s not just banking customers getting an exceptional level of service, the team is also using Sales Cloud to simplify the complex process of taking out a mortgage.

“We’ve built a basic workflow to push opportunities through the pipeline and help the sales team handle mortgage applications from inception to completion,” said Sidhu. “Mortgages are one of the processes that still require us to send physical letters, but using Conga from AppExchange has made generating those letters so much simpler.”

Where previously mortgage paperwork was a time-consuming, manual process, with Salesforce applications can now be submitted in 15 minutes instead of 90. Digital forms are formatted to ensure the right type of data is entered, which reduces time spent on quality control before submitting.

“Salesforce gives us a solid foundation to build more functionality and adapt for the future,” explained Sidhu. “Our infrastructure is agile and designed to scale, so as our strategy evolves, we know technology will be an enabler and not hold us back.”

And when it comes to future opportunities, Salesforce gives Tandem better visibility of the sales pipeline to help identify where it can cross- and upsell to promote organic growth.

“With Salesforce, we’ve transformed the customer experience and supercharged company growth,” said Usher. “We have ambitions to be the UK’s ‘good green bank’, and as protecting the planet becomes more important to people, we can attract customers with our strong ethos and green initiatives and retain them with industry-leading digital services.”