Meeting the Demands of Accelerating Customer Expectations
Today, the care center experience can set companies apart. ATB Financial, a leading Canadian financial institution, is harnessing out-of-the-box thinking and culture, combined with workforce optimization and customer analytics, to help create unique and amazing experiences for customers and team members alike.
I presented a session with ATB yesterday at the Frost and Sullivan Executive MindXchange in San Diego, California. The following is an overview of that session with Steve Fedorchuk, Vice President, Customer Care, and Dwayne Calder, Director of Operations at ATB.
ATB’s belief is that the banking industry has always been good at making banking work for banks, but now in the age of the customer banks must become good at “making banking work for people.” “We are in the customer experience business; we just happen to be a bank,” is a common saying at ATB.
The company benchmarks itself against the top five banks in Canada, as well as Google, Zappos, and other customer experience leaders. ATB believes that behind every transaction is a customer, and behind every customer is a story, and behind every story is an opportunity to make a personal connection. They use this insight for customer experience process design in order to shape and influence the customer experience.
Voice of the customer data is translated into actionable improvements by using customer conversations and frontline team members to understand (and translate) down to root-cause levels. The company has leveraged these learnings to identify and work to improve 200 processes—which are experiential, operational and effort-related.
ATB engages in workforce management through innovative forecasting and scheduling. For example, they drive team member scheduling flexibilities with ten-week rotational schedules and the ability for team members to have “flex weeks” where employees choose when they want to work for around ten percent of their schedule.
Team members also get a five-day weekend every ten weeks. This schedule flexibility has helped drive a double-digit percentage increase in team member retention. The use of speech analytics is also helping ATB be proactive in addressing customer needs. For example, if a new product is launched, ATB gains insight into what customers are saying—what they like, dislike and/or don’t understand. They get ahead of issues and communicate proactively with team members to address common questions, misconceptions or process challenges. This input is also funneled back to various departments in charge of new products to help refine product offerings.
What are some of the results that ATB is achieving? Overall, customer care expenses have decreased 12 percent year over year, while call volume is trending upward at 25 percent. Additionally, ATB’s average cost per call has decreased 30 percent over the last two years. And how is ATB doing in overall customer satisfaction? ATB was ranked higher than the five largest national banks in Canada in the recent J.D. Power 2015 Canadian Retail Banking Satisfaction StudySM.
ATB is reducing customer effort, elevating the customer experience, and driving toward best-in-class customer engagement optimization. They are well on their path toward transforming banking—and fulfilling their mission of “creating happiness through banking.”
The post Meeting the Demands of Accelerating Customer Expectations appeared first on Customer Experience Management Blog.
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