Improving productivity and customer service in banking.

Operating model flaws

Fraud activity at a large retail bank had more than doubled year-on-year, whilst pressure to reduce costs had left staffing levels unchanged. There were higher losses, a huge growth in customer queries, and an average of three Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) regulation breaches every week.

Customer experience was suffering, with cases taking several days to resolve and requiring numerous contacts from different agents at each stage of the process.

Gobeyond Partners carried out a rapid big picture diagnostic and identified major flaws in the operating model design. The business had been separated into functional teams, each responsible for a part of the end-to-end process. This resulted in high levels of failure demand, errors, delay and waste caused by multiple hand-offs at every stage.

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Redesigned for end-to-end ownership

We led a team in creating a new operating model design based on end-to-end case ownership.

A pilot team was established to prove the concept by direct comparison with business as usual.

Agents were trained to handle all tasks and manage cases from end-to-end. Variability was reduced by capturing and coaching ‘one best way’ for each process element, whilst tasks were fully documented to form a solid base for continuous improvement (CI) activity.

The introduction of visual management boards allowed agents to monitor performance at hourly, daily and weekly intervals. Live KPIs updated in real time and a decision tree supported agents in responding to changing circumstances autonomously, freeing the team leader to focus on coaching, quality and management tasks.

A senior visitor to the team said the CI approach was the best she had ever seen, particularly because it was driven by performance data, making it feel ‘alive’.

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Better customer service

Cases were transformed, with average end-to-end lead time reducing significantly.

There were no breaches of FCA rules over the eight week pilot period, whilst the usual business attracted 26 breaches in the same time.

The pilot team’s Net Promoter Score was +77.

Productivity increased by 20%

Following these successes, the new operating model design has been rolled out across the business.