High Street Banks
SmartNumbers™ helped speed change in high street banks
While all of the UK clearing banks have now deployed SmartNumbers, this story indicates how quickly and simply the services can be deployed across a large estate to speedily solve a strategic business problem.
The Business Challenge
As with many retail banks, one of the largest retail banks had invested in establishing call centres to handle customers' queries that had previously been handled by the branch. Despite this investment, the bank was finding that customers much preferred to call their branch. Only one other bank had continued to allow customers to call their branches directly and had advertised this relentlessly. Furthermore it was becoming clear that reversing the policy and allowing calls to branch could help differentiate their brand locally and helps turn 'tellers to sellers'.
In February 2007, the bank decided they needed to allow customers to call their local branch without a large capital investment, staff retraining or relocation, and quickly.
The Solution
A 2 week sales cycle that resulted in a 3 year contract, and after careful design of 7 different branch templates, SmartNumbers was deployed across the entire estate of 1,900 branches within a 6 week period.
The solution ensures that customers can now call their local branch. The bank claims that it was changing its policy last year, which had cut the number of queries to its call centres by 26% - considerably more than the 8% it had expected.
SmartNumbers also provides rich management information on the customer experience as well as staff productivity.
The Result
This marks a major u-turn for a bank that has routed its calls to India since 2004. The bank were able to design and test the required service, without any capital investment, and rollout the service with very low project risk in 6 short weeks.
Previously the bank's 10 call centres in the UK were busy, customers were put through to an operation in Mumbai. The bank argues this overflow is no longer necessary.