Established in 2001, MTA Solicitors LLP is a nationwide law practice with solicitors in London, Bromley, Manchester and Cambridge and the ability to represent commercial and private clients from anywhere in England and Wales.
Multi-skilled and technologically advanced, MTA helps thousands of clients a year make successful personal injury compensation claims, win employment tribunals, settle commercial and private debt disputes, create long-standing wills and trusts, and successfully litigate across a wide spectrum of the law.
David Reeves has been at the organisation for the last thirteen years. David started as a Personal Injury Team Manager before taking on the role of Head of Systems Development – a role he has been in for the past 12 years.
Power of Hindsight
MTA are always looking to stay ahead of their competition when it comes to technology: constantly seeking ways to utilise innovative solutions and therefore guaranteeing the customer’s journey is always improving.
All IT systems are controlled in-house which gives MTA complete control and allows a tailored experience to the benefit of both customers and staff.
In discussing technology at MTA David says “We wanted to implement a new Case Management System – and having address validation integrated into it was in the top 3 requests from management.
We took the opportunity to have the quality of our address data analysed using AFD Software’s Address Healthcheck Service. We were disappointed at the poor state of our address book and the results highlighted the need to put into place a method of validating addresses.
If we could go back and implement tighter controls at initial data entry we would have done – hindsight is a wonderful thing! Nevertheless, the results from the Address Healthcheck allowed us to correct a lot of the erroneous data that we had in the database – though this was much harder work than it would have been getting it right from the start.”
Having remedied the past, David and his team turned their attention to how they could eliminate the entry of incorrect address data going forward. Having been introduced to AFD Software through their partner Lexis Nexis, Postcode Plus was selected as the solution that could deliver the high-quality address data that they needed. Integration of Postcode Plus was seamless, saving both development time and integration cost.
The Customer Journey
Call centres are renowned for being a fast turnover environment. Speed, accuracy, customer satisfaction are all challenges – how does MTA ensure success?
Andrew Gray, MTA’s Call Centre Team Manager, highlights the benefits that AFD Postcode Plus introduces into their Call Centre. “We need to guarantee the customer’s journey is as smooth as possible. Often customers have already spoken to their motor insurers, garages, etc., repeating information each time.
Spelling errors and address formatting errors are taken out of the equation. Call Centre staff are able to build better rapport with clients and get straight towards a solution. It is very difficult having a customer spell ‘L-l-a-n-f-a-i-r-f-e-c-h-a-n’ or constantly being asked to repeat a line of their address. Our team enters the postcode and then immediately begins helping the client.”
Tangible Benefits
Whilst all these benefits are essential, we asked David what is the biggest tangible benefit to MTA Solicitors?
“For us, the biggest driver was the time saved by not having to key in data manually. On average we would make between 4 and 7 address checks on any new case, taking between 2 and 3 minutes to enter all the address data per case. On average we receive 2000 cases per month. That translates to a saving of between 4,000 and 6,000 minutes, 66 and 100 hours each month!”
Postcode Plus is deployed using AFD’s “Installed Evolution Service” giving the resilience of an installed solution with virtually zero maintenance and automatic data updates. David says “Having up-to-date address data is essential as we rely on it for service documents. In this sector, we simply cannot get addresses wrong.”
MTA Solicitors are investing in their IT systems to stay ahead of the competition and ensure their customer interaction is as efficient as possible. They have managed to accomplish this whilst saving valuable staff time and ensuring contact data in their database is accurate.
AFD Software has over 38 years of experience in providing Name, Address and Bank validation software – currently helping over 6,000 organisations regain control of their data.