Case Study: Improving Service Efficiency at a European Bank
Our client is a diversified financial services group providing a broad range of financial services domestically and selective financial services in a number of other markets. It is a public company with 39,000 stockholders and 15,600 employees worldwide.
"It is not about selling products or relationships; it is about the ordinary everyday tasks that are carried out to service these products and relationships,” explains the bank’s programme manager. “We are trying to make these more efficient and give better delivery to the customer."
The central Operations & Payments Division looks after all the retail operations that formerly were handled by the branches and has over 1,000 employees. The bank is continuously improving its services, as delivered through the branches and central support units. The Service Process Renewal programme is an example of such an improvement. The objective of the programme was to find more efficient ways to deliver current banking services in order to increase cost effectiveness and customer satisfaction.
"The Service Process Renewal programme addressed the service quality levels to the customer irrespective of segment," said the bank’s programme manager. "The Service Process Renewal Programme was set up as a number of discrete work streams. Initially, we were looking at the whole area of delivering cash service to our branches from our cashiers in the branch all the way through to our cash centres, which hold the cash. We needed to automate and streamline this process to make it more efficient. We then proceeded to look at a number of other areas including mail, telephones and foreign exchange. In all cases we took an end-to-end view focusing particularly on how and where the work is currently carried out and the interactions between branches and support units".
The bank needed a multi-disciplinary team that could design and develop the new processes and chose Original Solutions, now a part of Perot Systems as their provider because of their experience with a wide range of disciplines, including practical, business focused applications of technology. "Perot Systems’ experience of business processes, the management of the implementation of the re-engineering all the way through from process identification, to design, to specifying technology systems to implement them were important factors in their selection," says the bank’s programme manager.
From the early stages, Perot Systems worked with the bank to help staff clarify their thinking about the processes that would be required to achieve their objectives. The project took three years to fully implement, because the nature of the project consisted of several sub projects, one of which was the Cash Teller. The Operations Design Group included staff from branches, support units and Perot Systems who specified, designed, developed and delivered these new processes.
"We wouldn't have been able to fully resource this programme ourselves and our collaboration with Perot Systems has allowed us to augment our skills and resource pool to ensure we deliver the programme in the required timescale," says the bank’s programme manager. "The key characteristics of Perot Systems are that they employ good people and they support them well. We need Perot Systems’ expertise in business processes and the procedures that sit around them. Their commitment to our objectives is a key factor in the on-going relationship."