Geoban sharpens its back office operations with eg operational intelligence® software
Background
Geoban is part of Banco Santander that manages operational customer transactions conducted by the Group’s banks and financial institutions in the countries where it operates.
Geoban UK – a wholly owned subsidiary of Banco Santander and a non-profit plc registered in the UK – covers all operational activities for Santander UK and all its subsidiaries. A few examples are account opening, loan or credit card applications, national or international payments and/or transfers, and servicing customer accounts for the bank’s retail, corporate, investment, cards, insurance and private banking customers. To manage these diverse and large scale operations Geoban UK has established Centers of Excellence that provide services for the Santander UK entities.
The Geoban UK culture is dynamic, fast-paced and constantly evolving; embracing the Simple, Personal and Fair Values it extols for customers, employees and shareholders alike. Both the culture and metrics are focused on the end-to-end customer journey, operating in a continuously improving environment and by challenging themselves to constantly deliver 1% marginal gains in everything they do.
The eg operational intelligence® software suite has been an enabler in helping Geoban UK deliver cumulative savings in excess of £5m over the last three years.
Objectives
The back office Command Centre ensures Geoban UK effectively handles all work received via email, workflow, telephony and postal channels from both customers and front office branches within regulatory or contractual timescales, to the quality standard expected, in a controlled manner.
The Command Centre supports all operational teams with the following services: MI, Planning/Forecasting, eg work manager® support and performance planning for 10 sites supporting over 3000+ staff members. Through regular engagement with the operational teams all plans are reviewed and maintained to enable successful execution to meet targets around quality, control and productivity.
eg was engaged to optimise the effective use of resources within the operational teams. This involved a roll-out of the back office workforce optimisation solution to a total user base of 2,200+ people. This was supported by an operational management training framework, based on the eg principles of operational management® to achieve:
- Consistent management practices
- Improved Team Leader capability
- Measurable improvements in performance and capacity
The Solution
An original pilot project had proved that the business could be optimised if real-time intra-day work management functionality were to be implemented. Geoban UK had historically used a basic data capture tool and had monthly planning models in place for some business areas within Geoban, but not 100% coverage and not at daily or intraday levels. MI delivery was also part of a different team.
Following the initial implementation of the eg operational intelligence® software suite, the MI team joined the Command Centre unit and planning models were put in place with 100% coverage across Geoban UK. Using the eg principles of operational management® training framework, eg worked with Geoban to create an in-house “Geoban Principles” framework to take into account the specific culture, policies and requirements of Geoban.
In the second phase, following implementation of the software, the Command Centre had fully embraced the tool and were delivering the ‘Flat Back Office’ concept i.e. working with a similar number of resources, irrespective of peaks in transactional volume flowing through to the operational back office teams.
This was done using eg work manager® through proactively improving quality, control and productivity.
The specifics included:
- Capture of all back office work and resource including scheduling of training and holidays
- Daily forecast and capacity models across all functions
- Strategic work allocation to drive optimised performance & processing efficiency across functions
- Performance analysis at an individual agent and task level to analyse variations and therefore optimise productivity and resource usage
- End-to-end SLA management
Achievements
The project has revolutionised the way the Command Centre operates, and in addition to the productivity benefits achieved, the measurement, planning and overall performance of the Command Centre is exemplary:
- SLA Management has improved – 2015 YTD vs 2014, a 70% reduction in the contractual breaches reported weekly. This is in addition to continuously reducing SLA targets and the end-to-end Customer journey time.
- Stock* levels of transactions were reduced by 60%, making the above SLA target reductions possible * The volume or hours of work waiting to be addressed (work in progress).
- Circa 6000 intraday alerts were sent in 2015 YTD to prevent service breaches
- Forecasting to within 5% of actual volume of receipts of work, through continuous review with Marketing, historic data and new trend analysis.
- Working with the corporate operations team, the Command Centre assessed the FTE and process impact of moving to a 1 day SLA on the Account Opening process, which is industry best practice. YTD a 100% adherence to this SLA has been achieved.
- Utilising eg work manager® data to support the HR function with the recruitment process (short term advisor recruitment), advising recruitment requirements across Geoban UK, and the length of service required.
- In 2015, working jointly with the Retail ISA operations team, daily capacity management was invoked to ensure the marketing forecast variation (61% to plan) was reacted to quickly. 51 FTE were redeployed across different Geoban processes that had resource requirements.
- Within the complex and highly regulated world of complaints management, eg work manager® has helped to embed a culture of intra-day management of complaints, stock levels and reporting to the regulator. As a consequence of this, management of workflow of complaints, customer acceptance of complaints (a key metric in the eyes of the regulator) has risen to an industry level benchmark within the Geoban UK team.
“For me, the eg work manager® toolkit, along with our philosophy of using the data from it to drive business decisions, is a key ingredient to Geoban UK’s roaring success in its cultural transformation journey over the last 2-3 years in particular. Without eg work manager® and its principles, combined with the sterling effort of the Command Centre team, I doubt that Geoban UK would ever be recognised as the benchmark operation unit globally across the Group as is the case today!” concluded Jas Narang – Director, Governance, Control & Finance.
For further information, please go to
http://egoptimize.com/resources/#casestudies
About eg solutions
eg solutions is a provider of enterprise workforce optimisation solutions, specialising in the back office. eg pioneered this new market space and developed the most complete, purpose built workforce optimisation software for back offices – the only solution that manages work, people and end-to-end processes wherever they are undertaken, anywhere in the world.
Over 100,000 users in leading UK and international companies in multiple industry sectors, including financial services, healthcare and utilities use our software.
Using our forecasting, scheduling, real-time work management and operational analytics capabilities we deliver measurable improvements in customer service, quality, productivity and regulatory compliance. Supported by the eg principles of operational management implementation and training services we guarantee operational productivity gains and return on investment in short timescales.
Regardless of who is serving the customer – call centre, back offices, branches or the field – our solutions provide true insight into the full customer service process and promote world-class operational management capability.
The eg operational intelligence suite is available in the cloud, as a managed service, and on-premise.
The Company is listed on the Alternative Investment Market (‘AIM’) of the London Stock Exchange (EGS).
