Group of clenched fists touching over a desk

Case Study

Newcastle Building Society

Connecting communities to a better financial future
Helping members from all walks of life for more than 160 years
Providing essential services to generations of members

Introduction

Diving deeper into their working relationship with Zest and plans for the future, we sat down with Newcastle Building Society’s Head of Reward, Ben Thomas, to film our latest Case Study.

Ben also provides more detail into the specific integration requirements NBS needed to launch their employee benefits platform.

You can discover more about our customers here.

Why were you looking for a new benefits provider and platform?

We’ve got a great array of benefits at Newcastle Building Society, but we were finding increasingly that there were dotted around all over the place.

We had some on our intranet, we had some in other places that you had to e-mail people on that were just managed by different teams and so we really wanted to consolidate it, bring it all under one roof, make it really easy for people to access it and just kind of highlight everything that we’ve got, which I think really our colleagues haven’t necessarily appreciated until that point and try to really simplify a lot of those processes for our colleagues throughout.

How did you find the process of launching your platform with Zest for the first time?

It was great. It worked really well. I’ve done a couple of flexible benefit launches before but I liked the fact that you just had a single point of contact at Zest who we would meet up with on a regular basis.

I had a couple of calls at least every week and really worked it through. That was right from design through to testing. The launch and then post launch support, it made it really easy for us and you weren’t trying to hand over lots of information to lots of different colleagues at Zest

They made a single point of contact, which definitely made that process really smooth for us, and the launch went really well.

We managed to get it working through single sign on through our Active Directory. That made it really simple for people to log on to the platform. The landing page landed really well. We did quite a lot of pre comms so we teased it out to our colleagues in advance. We did posters around new organisations as well but it was really well received when it launched. It launched on time and landed where we needed it to.

Do you think Zest’s technology and has it helped engage your employees?

Yes, that’s definitely the feedback that we’ve had and it has been really positive. When we took our colleague Insight Forum, which is a representative of our business just a couple of weeks ago, we asked them for their feedback and they genuinely said it was beyond their expectations.

They knew something was coming, but it exceeded everything. That’s quite a difficult task to do. People really like the look and feel of it. It felt very well branded. It felt like us being able to use a lot of our own imagery, being able to use a lot of our own colours, putting our logo onto the site. It just felt like it had been almost custom made for us and so people engaged with it really well.

We also really like the simplicity of the platform as well as being able to see everything actually just on one page. That’s very difficult, it looks easy when you see it, but actually it’s quite difficult to do and actually just got one landing page where you can pretty much do everything. You’ve then got sub venues.

I think the fact that it is really intuitive, we didn’t need to do lots of training for our colleagues across the business. It really was just ‘send them the link, give them the information to tell them the dates that they really did kind of self-serve them.’

They managed to navigate around everything themselves. They took to it like ducks to water.

Could you share specific examples of benefits that have seen increased participation among employees?

We’ve actually just pulled some management information on this that I’m going to share with our executive team. We saw over 200 different pension selections through the site, which for us is over more than 10% of our workforce. So over 10% of our colleagues essentially chose to amend their pension contributions, which first was really important.

As a society, we’re about connecting communities with a better financial future. It needs to be in the heart of what we do from an employer perspective as well. It’s about connecting colleagues with a better financial future. We’ve got a great pension scheme that people weren’t necessarily making the most and the platform has really helped us highlight that to individuals, making it really easy for them to amend their pension contributions and get more from the society in return. So, it really helps fulfil our purpose and we saw some really good engagement with that.

What do you think of your relationship with Zest?

The relationship has been really good actually. Again, I like the fact that we’ve got one or two points of contact across Zest. They’re really open to hearing our ideas. We’re already speaking to them and their product team around tweaking factors slightly? Can we have a look at this just to really fine tune?, Doing it and making it even better.

They’ve been really receptive to those ideas. As well, we really like their ethos. They feel very aligned to our purpose and they just really keep things simple. They don’t make things overly complicated. They don’t try to project manage the life out of you. They just really do what they say on the tin and their platform is fantastic as well.

A desk with printouts of charts and a laptop on it

Did you face any challenges with the platform?

I can’t think of any significant challenges we had. As I’ve said, there’s a couple of elements where we want to customise it slightly and you’re able to do a huge amount of customisation on the site and you’re able to do it yourselves rather than sending it through to Zest on your behalf and then getting charged for it.

We really like the flexibility that you have on the platform. You’re able to add your own imagery. You’re able to update the text at any time. You’ve got a lot of functionality.

There’s a couple of minor things that we do want to still work with Zest on, but we know they’re really open to that. We’re looking forward to continuing to use them long into the future.

Would you recommend working with Zest and if so why?

Absolutely. But for all the reasons I’ve said, really, they’re really straightforward to of deal with.

They keep things really simple. There’s very little jargon that you have to wade through, which you often do find with different benefits providers and the technology is really great. It’s really simple, it’s intuitive. And our colleagues love it.

Two people chatting while having a drink

Were there any specific customisation or integration requirements for the platform to align with your company’s needs?

Yes, there were a couple of things that we’ve asked them to do.

Single sign on was a big one for us. We wanted it to make it as easy as possible for people to be able to access the platform while they were on our network. That worked really well and the integration in that worked great. We also wanted to actually just keep it on our network as well. So, being able to customise it to actually say that, that was brilliant and that really met our purpose from a security point of view.

And more recently we’ve just launched a new benefit called Colleague Mortgage and we worked really closely with the Zest team to get that added on to the platform and it’s something that’s quite new out there, it’s our own benefit.

There aren’t many providers who offer this, if any. So, we feel we’re quite cutting edge and we’ve managed to design that benefit within the platform, and as we’ve seen, we’ve had a really good take up on that benefit as well and that’s what we feel that’s really set us apart as an employer and that’s been enabled through zest.

Could you share a specific success story or scenario where Zest platform played a crucial role in addressing a particular challenging or enhancing positive outcome?

There’s a specific example about our pension take up that has been a real win for us. We really wanted to focus on pension engagement, getting people reviewing and amending their pension contributions. So the fact that the Zest platform allowed us to do that has been great. But I’d say overall we were targeting and we felt this was quite ambitious. When we first launched that, we found 75% of our colleagues can log into the platform within the three-week window that we had in place, taking into account people who are on holiday, long term sick absence and we also have a lot of branch-based colleagues who are logging on from the computer all the time as well, but we actually more than exceeded that. I think it was 86-87% that we got in the end, which we were really happy with and it’s really good engagement.

So for us that was an achievement above and beyond what we thought was quite an ambitious target and Zest definitely helped us meet that by providing such a great platform.

Related case studies

Person reviewing a chart on their mobile phone

'When you're looking at all the implementation, we have given Zest some really weird, wonderful and crazy pension rules and nothing has been too difficult.'

Compensation, Benefits & Wellbeing Specialist, Weil, Gotshal & Manges (London) LLP