Best Practices for Branch Excellence
By now, we probably all recognize that the nature of banking is changing fairly dramatically. Routine transactions are shifting away from the branch as digital channels grow in popularity, thus reducing branch visits—and more significantly for banks—reducing the face-to-face sales and service interactions.
In order to maximize the remaining interactions, banks need to evolve their business models and management processes to achieve branch excellence.
Branch Challenges
Managing a decentralized branch network presents real challenges for banking executives. They have little visibility into what their employees are doing on a daily basis, yet they rely on these same employees to provide a high-quality customer experience and to deliver results.
In this distributed environment, managing productivity is critical to help ensure branch employees are focused on the right metrics and the right activities to drive sales and revenue—and provide exceptional service.
Many organizations have done a good job of establishing more sales-focused workforce management programs—forecasting sales requirements, aligning staff to match needs and market opportunities, and scheduling resources to customer demand and revenue-generating activities. However, much more is needed.
The Benefits of a Holistic Approach
To make effective decisions about how to evolve their branch networks, banks need a standardized framework that gathers key performance data and creates a holistic view of its operations. Data about productivity, service levels, quality, and employee satisfaction can also provide management with much-needed information.
Solutions such as desktop and process analytics can help banks not only capture information from each employee desktop, but also measure times for activities and monitor end-to-end processes to identify areas for improvement.
Through this automatic capture of data, employees can be measured against clear objectives and consistent activity-based performance standards across the branch network. Through role-based scorecards, employees can see how they are performing against their goals and take corrective actions as needed.
Retail banking executives can finally gain the visibility they need to more effectively manage their businesses. They can review time spent on activities across the branch network—and then view a comparison of actual employee utilization to expected utilization. These executives will then be more equipped to identify gaps in sales and service productivity and actually quantify the sales revenue that could be delivered if employees spent time on the right activities.
Thus, they can better understand financial impacts and where corrective action may be needed.
Managers across the organization can also view critical performance information based upon their level in the hierarchy. They can drill down into specific branch groups, a single branch, and even down to the individual employee. More importantly, they will be armed with objective and timely data to have targeted and meaningful conversations with employees and can speak specifically about how employees are excelling and how they need to improve. This process helps management and employees make changes faster—allowing for better business results faster.
As branches begin to shift their business models to use this framework, they can help distinguish themselves from their competition. Adopting a holistic management approach can offer the actionable intelligence needed to help boost employee productivity, drive sales and revenue, and optimize overall branch performance.
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