Our Operating Model Transforms a Major UK Retail Bank’s Revenue

A relationship based model for effective customer management.

Longer processing impacting revenue

A major UK retail bank was suffering from a long lead time to process new investments for wealthy customers.

The sales team was struggling to provide customers with the levels of service expected in this premium market and was having to manage cases on an individual basis. This was impacting revenues.

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New teams, new skills

A rapid diagnosis of the problem revealed:

• End-to-end lead time averaging 13 weeks & growing
• A minimum of 12 handoffs across multiple functions and two Divisions

The fragmented operating model, which resulted in customer case files being passed around multiple teams with different skills, was inappropriate for the variety and complexity in these bespoke customer portfolios.

There was a lack of ownership of a customer’s file, meaning difficult decisions were passed on to another team. Individuals were targeted on their volume of case output, meaning difficult cases were not being tackled. Each team was aligned to a specific sales region. Sales advisors now knew exactly where their customer’s case file was – it was always in the same team and that team’s manager was responsible for processing the case as efficiently as possible.

To build a better solution for customers and the sales team it was decided to design cross-functional Fulfilment Teams who would own and process a customer’s case from start to finish. Each team had the skills to process every case, apart from c.5% of exceptions where a specialist would be called in to assist.

Each team was aligned to a specific sales region. Sales advisors now knew exactly where their customer’s case file was – it was always in the same team and that team’s manager was responsible for processing the case as efficiently as possible.

The operating model was designed and taken through proof of concept (one team/area) and pilot (3 teams/areas) before being rolled out across the business. The key to success, and a major challenge for implementation, was the need to increase staff skill levels to ensure every team had the skillset and experience needed to deal with the variety of customer needs.

As part of the implementation a new KPI hierarchy was built and implemented for the Fulfilment area, aligning measures bottom-to-top and end-to-end.

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£4.3 million of additional revenue

The new operating model was a great success with the sales teams, who could now service their customers effectively. Impacts included:

• A 40% reduction in end-to-end time to invest for the main product
• A 55% reduction in the variability of lead time, making sales promises more reliable
• Sales capacity equivalent to £4.3 million of additional revenues generated to reinvest in growth

Fig 1: cross-functional Fulfilment Teams were designed to process customer cases to completion