An update on our new system and our service levels

Thank you

All of us at SafeDeposits Scotland would like to thank our customers for their patience during an extremely busy few weeks for the scheme. We recently marked SafeDeposits' 10th birthday and we can confidently say that at no point in the past decade have we had a period like the one following the launch of our new system on 18th July. We hope that our customers will agree with this - we'll address the issues of the past month below, but landlords, letting agents and tenants who are familiar with us will know that system errors and difficulty reaching someone are simply not the standard SafeDeposits experience.

What happened?

The creation and launch of our new system has been a project over two years in the making. Ahead of launch the system was vigorously and repeatedly tested. Unfortunately some features which worked in testing did not function properly when the system went live.

Issues with these functions would have affected a small percentage of our users at a given time, and while our developer partners worked behind the scenes to fix the problems we would have been able to help affected customers navigate around them without any major impact on our day to day operation. A separate variable however made things more complicated...

Over 500,000 activation emails were sent at the launch, including to some inactive customers. This was a system error, as was the sending of the incorrect email text (all recipients were sent emails which suggested they were new users). For those no longer using the scheme, this understandably raised questions and as such we received an unprecedented volume of enquiries via all channels - telephone, email and social media.

To put this in perspective, during the week commencing 18th July alone we were presented with 33,000 phone calls; we handled 36,000 calls during the entirety of 2021. We are a small team of 21 people, so while we were answering calls nonstop and putting in extra hours to do so, the scale of contacts was like nothing the scheme has experienced in 10 years.

Where are we now?

Happily, at 12th August the volume of calls has reduced significantly although our contact centre is still busier than usual. Right now you can expect to wait a few minutes at most for a call to be answered (a vast improvement on where we were a couple of weeks ago) however our average wait time in normal circumstances is a tiny nine seconds and we are working hard to return to that level of service. Similarly we are working through a backlog of email enquiries to restore our email response time to its usual promptness.

In terms of the new system, faults are being fixed and we can confirm that initial issues with the tenant changeover function have been resolved. It is also now possible to download Prescribed Information forms and Deposit Protection Certificates. Our Customer Relations team is in contact with letting agent customers who have more specific requirements, namely relating to bulk uploads, and is on hand to support them.

Going forward

The purposes of launching our new system have been to enhance the user experience and to ensure that the system is flexible and adaptable in response to future developments in technology. This end goal has not changed despite the road bumps of the past few weeks, and while the user experience aspect in particular has not got off to the smoothest start we know that when the creases are ironed out our customers will notice the positive differences. Landlords, letting agents and tenants all have new functions available to them which will help save time and streamline communication between parties, among other benefits.

Among the feedback we have received from some customers is that they were happy with the old system, so why did we change it? This is a very valid question. Although there have been no changes on the user side for many years, the age of the system has meant a continuing requirement to re-write its script which impacts its current economic viability and would ultimately restrict it technologically in future.

The new system will be performing at its best before long - we will continue to provide updates on fixes and improvements, and in the meantime we offer our sincere thanks again to our customers for their continued patience.