Recognise and empower the best customer-facing staff

There are many aspects to delivering excellent customers service, particularly in financial services where credit-based decisions can often leave customers deeply disappointed.

There is an entire industry dedicated to improving the customer experience, from staff training to measurement, but an area that is often overlooked is the processes in place that can slow down decision-making and customer service. The infuriating wait while the person serving needs to ‘check with my manager’ is a case in point.

At least one leading bank is now using data management to improve the customer experience by recognising historic customer data and the decision-making history of the person serving them. By recognising and empowering high calibre employees, the banks delivers better customer experience and simultaneously benefits from improved operational efficiency.

Whilst the initiative is innovative, it hasn’t been laborious to achieve. The banks simply makes better use of its data. It already captures historical transaction data, and team member performance data against each transaction, in multiple databases. What it is now doing is using the information to make better decisions around processes and approval.

The bank creates and updates a risk assessment score for each team member at a branch location. It then uses this information combined with approximately 100 ‘rules’ to change a team member’s authority based upon each transaction, the team member’s transaction history and the teller’s risk assessment score.

In short, it uses technology to empower customer-facing team members; delivering better service, more fulfilling roles and improving operational efficiencies.