Changing and challenging times
March 17 2020
March 17 2020
Over the past few weeks and months, we have had some very exciting work going on behind the scenes and with the fast-moving developments associated with COVID-19, it’s a timely opportunity to share an outline of our short and long term plans for future-proofing and resilience as an organisation.
Following the latest advice from the Government, our main office will be closed from 4.30 pm on Tuesday 17th March. Our office-based team will all be working from home from 8.30 am on Wednesday 18th March onwards and we will be able to correspond and communicate with our customers and others via phone and email in the usual way. Our loans advisers will be liaising with customers remotely, rather than visiting their homes until further notice.
In terms of our longer-term plans, we wanted to show support for other businesses right now and announce some developments. We have been keen for some time to extend the reach of our services to other communities beyond the South West region that we currently serve. Therefore, the Board and our CEO, Emma Lower, have recently appointed Morledge & Co. who are working with us on a full re-brand and repositioning exercise. Both Karen Morledge and brand consultant, Danny Gosling, have already started working with us on this important area of work which will come to fruition over the coming months.
We intend to not just extend our area of operations geographically, but in conjunction with our stakeholders, we have identified a number of new areas where our unique approach to providing effective and efficient loans and funding solutions to communities. We will soon be actively looking for more partnerships with local authorities and others, to help support the climate change emergency as well as the wider health and wellbeing agenda. Read more about our future plans here.
For many months, we have also been working extremely hard to procure new systems and processes to provide greater choice and flexibility to our customers. We are delighted to be working with Bright Office on a new cloud-based CRM solution that will literally revolutionise our business, by formally moving to offer more of an online service model for our customers. This seems even more critical now and we are looking forward to being able to roll this out as soon as possible and we will share details of this as soon as we can.
Meanwhile, as a social enterprise and despite our office closure and staff working remotely, we are all still very much ‘business as usual’ in line with our business continuity plan. We are to here support all of our customers and stakeholders in the region and will follow government advice to protect our staff and communities first and foremost. See the latest updates and information, by following us on our social media channels.