Hybrid Mail Service Solution
Case Study

Introduction

Teachers Building Society, founded in 1966, provides savings accounts and mortgages for teachers and other education professionals across England and Wales. For the last 55 years Teachers Building Society has helped many teachers buy their first homes.

Unlike other high street lenders the mutual organisation doesn’t have a branch network, instead providing services by phone, post and email. It prides itself on excellent communication with members across all channels. The business sends a high number of written communications to its members each day, including 13,000 annual statements per year.

Teachers Building Society was looking for an effective and efficient solution to distribute postal communications during the COVID-19 pandemic. The business understood the restrictions and time it takes to manage their own document distribution, therefore they needed a partner and solution to help the team spend less time on admin and communication tasks, and more time doing what they do best – providing an outstanding service to their members. Therefore the team looked for an outsourced solution.

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Business: Teachers Building Society

Location: Wimborne, Dorset, UK

Size: 50+ staff

Activity: Financial services

Challenge

Maintaining the quality production and timely distribution of customer communications whilst colleagues were working from home during the COVID-19 pandemic

Solution

Hybrid mail service and an outsourced print and post solution

Benefits

Reduced requirement for office based collation and distribution of communications, in turn facilitating increased time to be spent providing outstanding service to members during the pandemic.

Teachers Building Society’s relationship with Unifiedpost Group started several years ago on the basis of helping the business realise a more efficient way to distribute their annual statements. Through our print and post set-up we were able to release the burden of printing, packaging and distributing all of Teachers’ annual statements in a much more timely and cost-effective manner. This meant that their members received their annual statements promptly, and the Teachers team were left without having to deal with this administrative task.

Challenge

With the introduction of the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown and working from home practices, Teachers Building Society sought a more effective solution to produce, print and post their daily ad-hoc communications. With the majority of the team working from home, ensuring the business’ post was printed and distributed in a timely manner to their members was key.

Our Solution

Teachers Building Society therefore began to research Hybrid Mail solutions to support their daily member document and communication distribution. Due to the longstanding relationship with ourselves at Unifiedpost Group, the business was keen to explore our Hybrid Mail offering further.

From what many believe is a complicated process, Teachers was thrilled at how simple our Hybrid Mail solution seemed. The team were given a demonstration and tested the environment to make sure that the Hybrid Mail solution fit with exactly what they required.

After a quick installation and set-up, Teachers was able to move onto the service quickly and reap its benefits. Unifiedpost Group’s Hybrid Mail solution has given Teachers more control over their outbound communications, and provides a solution that releases the administrative burden of producing and distributing outbound mail every day. The building society’s team therefore had more time to focus on their core roles and to support the outstanding service to their members.

What it’s like working with Unifiedpost Group

“Overall we have found Unifiedpost Group to be professional, attentive, helpful and adaptive to our needs. We’ve found the service to be simple and straightforward. They even took the time to run a training workshop on the Hybrid Mail service for our colleagues to ensure they were all comfortable using it.”

Teachers Building Society

Benefits

Unifiedpost Group’s Hybrid Mail solution has given Teachers Building Society another option for how they can distribute their member communications and documents. Our Hybrid Mail solution is perfect for the types of communications the business needs to send out on a daily basis, from individual letters to mail merged communications. Before Hybrid Mail, the print and post process required investment of both time and resources which colleagues can now spend supporting members in other ways.

When looking at the day to day benefits, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic, Teachers see Hybrid Mail as a new, modern way of working. Teachers say they now have more resources in place, such as Hybrid Mail, which allow staff to work from home and have a better work life balance. Our Hybrid Mail solution means that the building society’s staff no longer need to be in the office full time to be able to deliver member communications successfully. Not only are the team benefiting from the solution, but Teachers Building Society members are as well.

“Unifiedpost Group’s Hybrid Mail service has meant that we have been able to continue to allow our colleagues to work from home, keeping them safe and protected. Importantly, it has made us more efficient allowing us to spend more time building relationships with our members.”