CASE STUDY: GIFT VOUCHER SHOP

Outsourced scanning service provided by Kefron Capture, part of the Kefron Group, enables the Gift Voucher Shop to fulfil major contract with UK Post Office while complying with anti-money-laundering legislation and streamlining business operations.

CUSTOMER BACKGROUND

The Gift Voucher Shop (GVS) is the company behind the well-known One4All gift vouchers on sale across the country via the An Post branch network and independent retailers. In recent years, the company has also launched the gift card in the UK. It has a thriving corporate business, too, which provides gift vouchers to private businesses, which use them for the likes of staff-loyalty and trade-incentive programmes. GVS has 75 employees and is based in Swords, Co Dublin.

CUSTOMER SITUATION

The Gift Voucher Shop (GVS) has an expanding relationship with Post Office Limited in the UK. Through this relationshp GVS landed the job of managing the Post Office’s long-standing and very popular budget savings scheme. This scheme, which had in the region of 300,000 customers, allowed people to save towards their household bills rather than having to pay them off in one go.

Traditionally paper based, The Post Office now decided to modernise the service. Instead of stamps, customers would be issued with a reloadable electronic Budget Card to which they would add money as and when they wanted through any Post Office branch.

However, mainly for anti-fraud reasons, customers could not simply be switched over to the service. Instead, they would be required to complete an application form at their local post office branch and submit it along with two forms of ID. Expecting a tidal wave of applications, it was a challenge to the Post Office to process the tidal wave of applications forms which would be flowing in its direction as customers moved en masse to Budget Card – and do so within a time window of just a few weeks.

SOLUTION

According to John Mahon, Group Operations Manager at GVS, he and his colleagues quickly realised large-scale application processing was not a task they could take on – or would want to.

“Between space and staffing we didn’t want to get involved in doing it in-house and we realised that with the regulatory requirements as they were we had to make sure they were filed correctly and easily accessible by us,” he says.

What GVS had originally envisaged was a provider taking application forms off its hands, filing them and then being able to pull out individual files and deliver them back to GVS on request. After consulting with Kefron, GVS realised there was a better way.

IMPLEMENTATION

The two companies worked closely together and in the first month alone they got about 130,000 application forms.  Kefron assured GVS that it would be able to cope with the volume, and it was as good as its word says Mahon. “They took on extra staff for the peak period. They processed them all and within a couple of months we were back to normal volumes.”

In addition, Kefron were able to advise on archiving compliance and instead of storing the paper forms that had been scanned, they could be stored digitally because they were high quality scans. Kefron provided the secure destruction service and this resulted in a cost saving.

BENEFITS

Since Kefron began providing GVS with its outsourced document management service in mid-2010 many benefits have been seen.

• COST SAVINGS – Cost savings takes two forms. The first is in terms of labour costs the second on storage.

• PROCESS EFFICIENCY- Kefron’s skilled form processing provides efficiencies not obtainable in-house and allows the GVS to focus on what they do well.

• BUSINESS CONTINUITY – Entering an outsourcing arrangement with Kefron gave GVS an important sense of control during the project without the worry of administration overload.

• CUSTOMER SERVICE- Kefron’s software facilitates instant access the files.

• LEGAL COMPLIANCE – The kefron high quality scanning combined with quick-access software enabled compliance with anti-money laundering legislation.