1. Verint Witness Actionable Solutions has expanded its product suite with solutions and functionality that caters to contact center, branch and back-office environments. What impact is this having on your customer base and the industry?
Banking is a people intensive business. In North America, branch banking employs an estimated 1.1 million tellers and sales personnel. Our Impact 360™ Workforce Optimization suite provides a powerful solution set designed specifically to help organizations optimize workflow, service quality and the performance of this enormous body of workers, increasing output and effectiveness while minimizing costs. The Verint Witness Actionable Solutions Enterprise Solutions Group’s innovation comes from its ability to transfer workforce optimization technologies that have long been successfully used in contact centers and apply them to branch networks and back-office environments, enabling these other areas of the enterprise to benefit from the same staffing and performance efficiencies. Historically, these technologies could not cross the line of business boundaries due to data feed constraints, usability and functional specific forecasting requirements. Our Impact 360 for Retail Financial Services solution, for example, helps counter those once limiting issues – enabling banks to optimize the performance of the branch employees, and consequently lower costs and improve the customer experience.
Impact 360 for Retail Financial Services combines information from different systems and areas within banking centers, then presents it in clear, concise scorecards that enable customers to drill down quickly from “what” to “why.” For example, a regional branch manager can use the scorecard to evaluate the sales per full-time equivalent (FTE) per day in each branch within his or her region. The solution shows which branches are exceeding their goals and can even allow the manager to identify individual bank representatives who are outselling their colleagues. Better still, the branch manager can drill down to specific customer sessions to see the representatives’ usage of applications during these sessions. By analyzing this information, the manager can create a best-practice “lesson” and disseminate it to the branches — or assign the lesson to representatives who are falling behind on their daily sales.
2. What are the fundamental differences between optimizing the workforce in say a bank branch and the contact center?
There are a couple of major differences that can be broken down into two categories: data availability for forecasting and scheduling usability. To accurately forecast, schedule and monitor employees, customers need to be able to capture all of the work volumes and activities performed. In a contact center, all calls come over the ACD (automated call distributor) – so you have one rich data source for the majority of activities that occur in the contact center. This is not the case in the branch.
For example, in a branch, there are two very different customer work activities: teller transactional work in a teller window, and sales and service that take place at desks and counters. For the tellers, in addition to customer-facing activities, such as cashing a check or making a deposit – which can be captured in the core banking system – there are a number of non-customer facing activities that need to be captured as well, such as ATM balancing, coin/cash deliveries, night deposits, etc. The platform personnel also perform many service activities for which they do not need to log into a system, such as safety deposit box visits and general inquiries. There are multiple systems that capture activity data, and many activities for which no system data is available.
Verint Witness Actionable Solutions has been able to address these challenges by building in activity proxies and regression algorithms that help bank branches accurately build a workforce optimization model that incorporates all activities to ensure customer wait time targets are met and tasks are performed as efficiently as possible.
From a scheduling point of view, most bank branches have 10 of fewer people with less flexibility and critical mass than a call center. Consequently, while the scheduling challenge is less, there is also less expertise to focus on the scheduling process. Therefore, the scheduling interface needs to be as simple and intuitive as possible.
3. What are the differences and challenges in back-office environments?
In the back office, the challenges are the same, but the way you build tools to meet the demands of the back-office environment is different. In the back office, you have multiple departments working on many disparate systems. Verint Witness Actionable Solutions developed a volume capture capability that can gather data from multiple systems – from legacy tools such as Excel and even manual input – to generate activity volumes that account for all of the tasks performed, not just the major processing activities.
Another challenge of the back office is the myriad of metrics used by the different divisions to measure success. Instead of average call handle time and time in queue, back-office groups have processing deadlines and quotas, as well as service level agreements (SLAs) that must be met. Impact 360 for Back-office Operations features intra-day monitoring, so managers can adjust resources over the course of a day to maximize utilization and ensure deadlines are met. The solution also works for long-term tasks, such as loan processing. Further, it can track a process across multiple people, departments, and weeks or months, assessing adherence to protocols, turnaround times and process efficiencies.
The Impact 360 for Back-office Operations solution is able to convert data into actionable intelligence using custom dashboards for managers to identify how well they are performing against metrics at the individual, team, department or enterprise level. Managers are able to then proactively take steps to more accurately align skills to tasks, train or coach underperforming employees, and modify processes based on best practices.
4. Can you share how customers have leveraged the technology and the results they have received?
Certainly. Verint Witness Actionable Solutions has over 70 banks and credit unions worldwide leveraging its workforce optimization solutions in their branches. Take Wells Fargo Bank. It implemented our workforce management solution and was able to predict transaction volumes in its over 3,000 branches with 92 percent to 95 percent accuracy. This allowed the bank to meet customer service requirements by aligning resources to customer traffic flow.
SunTrust Banks, Inc. expanded its branch teller staffing model to incorporate its sales platform. By doing so, it was able to increase sales per FTE per day by 200 percent by realigning workday and workweek schedules to focus on sales, targeting sales staff time on proactive calling, and deploying sales staff to markets based on revenue opportunities. The bank’s sales model was able to integrate all of its branch sales force parameters, and simplified the reporting and outputs at the line level.
Banco Popular, North America created a workforce management model that identified over/under staffing occurrences across its 140 branches, resulting in the realignment of staff and a savings of $1.4 million in a 47 FTE branch staff reduction. It highlighted the opportunity to increase utilization by deploying more part-time staff, resulting in an increase from eight percent part-timers to 22 percent, and it provided visibility into and change management of all aspects of the business in order to improve efficiencies.
5. What do you anticipate will be your “hot” applications in the upcoming year?
We expect that our desktop activity management will be one of several hot capabilities in 2008. In the contact center, you have the audio recordings along with the desktop recordings to give you a full picture of the customer interactions. Unfortunately, this capability is missing in the branch or a distributed network, as well as the back office, where some, if not all, tasks are performed without person-to-person interaction.
Our desktop activity management sits on the local desktop and can capture all desktop activity (key strokes, change of screens/applications, etc.) or can capture events on the desktop as defined by the client. For example, if a customer service representative in a branch opens an application to complete a home equity loan, the bank could create triggers to capture specific steps and even “what if” events – such as if the amount entered is over $10,000. By capturing all activity or creating triggers, organizations can see which applications are being used when, whether processes and protocols are being followed, and can identify best practices, as well as variances for training and performance improvement purposes.
This functionality will provide organizations with insight into desktop workflow, helping them determine whether business applications and processes are correctly configured for optimum use and are being leveraged properly. Managers will know not only what their employees are spending their time on, but how effectively they are using the systems and tools available to them.
6. Down the road, what opportunities do you see to expand the core offerings of Verint Witness Actionable Solutions, especially for the financial services industry?
As security initiatives and compliance requirements grow, along with improved bandwidth in the financial services industry, I foresee the opportunity to gain greater “real time” insight into interactions in the branch and improve the productivity of this workforce with such tools as performance management, eLearning, and process analysis. With Verint Witness Actionable Solutions’ technologies, we can extend our recording and quality monitoring capabilities into the branch with in-branch, face-to-face recording. Initially this would likely take place on the sales side of the branch, recording for example, the opening of loan or investment accounts. But eventually I foresee face-to-face recording even at the teller window, especially as the teller role changes from very transaction-based to more of a customer service role.