European Bank: Improving Service Efficiency

Our client is a diversified financial services group providing a broad range of financial services. It is a public company with 39,000 stockholders and 15,600 employees worldwide.

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,” explains the programme manager. “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. We are trying to make these more efficient and give better delivery to the customer.”

The service process renewal programme was set up as a number of discrete workstreams. Initially it was looking at the whole area of delivering cash service to the branches from the cashiers in the branch all the way through to the cash centres which hold the cash. “We needed to automate and streamline this process to make it more efficient,” says the programme manager. “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 which could design and develop the new processes and we were selected as their partner because of our experience with a wide range of disciplines including practical, business focused applications of technology. “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 the selection”, says the bank’s programme manager.

From the early stages, we worked with the bank to help bank staff clarify their thinking about the processes that would be required to achieve their objectives. The project took three years to fully implement and because of the nature of the project consisted of several sub projects.

“We would not have been able to fully resource this programme ourselves and this collaboration with has allowed us to augment our skills and resource pool to ensure we deliver the programme in the required timescale", says the programme manager. "Their key characteristics are that they employ good people and they support them well. We need their 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."