Established in 2001, Cofunds is the UK’s largest independent platform for financial services:
- It is impartial as it does not offer advice or its own funds
- It accounts for 22% of the UK platform market
- It has three core propositions called Investor, Wealth and Enterprise, which provide five services for a mix of retail and institutional clients
- It has assets under administration (AUA) over £50bn (as at 14.03.13).
Cofunds’ web platform is world-class and award winning. Recognised by the UK Platform Awards 2012 as the Best Institutional Platform, and by Shares Awards 2012 as the Best Fund Supermarket, Cofunds is constantly investing in improving its platform.
In August 2012 Cofunds invested in UserReplay as part of its commitment to continually enhance customer service, and the performance of the platform.
Before UserReplay was adopted, when a customer called in with a perceived problem with the website, it was often difficult to determine whether the problem was a simple user error, or whether a genuine problem with the website had occurred. Escalation to application (3rd level) support usually ensued requiring painstaking analysis of log-files. This cycle of analysis would often take days, sometimes weeks. These issues were having a noticeable impact on precious internal resources, interrupting and slowing other projects.
UserReplay has comprehensively addressed this issue. The UserReplay software resides securely within the Cofunds platform, and passively records every user’s web journey for visual replay and technical diagnosis. Now when an intermediary calls in with an issue, their journey can be instantly identified and replayed step by step. If the problem is simply a user error, the matter can be resolved immediately by the Customer Services team (1st level support). When a genuine technical problem is found, it can be instantly replicated, analysed, and fixed, improving the website for future users.
Peter Pearce, Digital Manager of Cofunds commented: “UserReplay takes the guesswork out of finding and fixing problems. Elapsed resolution times of a week have been reduced to hours. Our customers now experience fewer problems, and when they do occur we can resolve them rapidly.“
Security was a key issue for Cofunds, Peter continued: “We chose UserReplay because it is highly secure and sits within our fully secure environment, meaning only Cofunds can access the data.”
Another key benefit of UserReplay is dispute resolution. Where financial products are sold over the phone, calls are always recorded for the benefit of both parties. UserReplay brings the same protections to eCommerce transactions. As well as ensuring a fair resolution, UserReplay massively reduces the amount of time spent. There is no need to analyse log files, and precisely what happened on a disputed transaction can quickly and clearly be demonstrated to all parties.
UserReplay has already provided an impressive return on investment. Peter Pearce commented: “In terms of tangible man-hour savings UserReplay paid for itself very quickly. However these savings are not the main benefit – Improving the quality of our platform, and providing excellent customer support are strategically important to Cofunds and the level of improvement achieved through UserReplay is significant.”
John Thompson, CEO of UserReplay commented: “Peter and his team have done an excellent job of implementing UserReplay. They have delivered the quick wins available from UserReplay around customer service, rapid fixing of bugs and fair resolution of customer disputes within weeks of deployment. We look forward to working with them to deliver further optimisation of their platform in 2013 and beyond.”
Cofunds also use SiteReplay, a website archiving service from UserReplay. SiteReplay captures a copy of each web-page exactly as it was originally rendered, together with its HTML & content and archives them daily with triple-hash verification for FSA compliance purposes.
Cofunds
Cofunds is the leading investment platform for advisers and other financial institutions, with assets under administration over £50bn (as at 14.03.13). It provides flexible administration and management services for advisers and their clients as well as dealing and custody services for financial institutions. It does not offer investment management or advice, nor does it compete with advisers by offering its services direct to the end client. Cofunds exists to serve the needs of institutions, advisers, their clients, and fund managers. Cofunds is authorised and regulated by the Financial Services Authority.
The case study can be downloaded at http://www.userreplay.com/resources/cofunds_case_study
