Opportunity
Prior to its merger with Bank of America, Fleet was the seventh largest financial holding company in the United States. Its network included 1,460 branches with over $190 billion in assets, and served 20 million customers. As a recognized leader in merger and acquisition integration, Fleet’s growth had been historically through acquisition. Economies of scale and efficiencies along with expense control drove shareholder value.
In 2002, a renewed focus on retail banking led to a customer-centric approach. The goal was to instill loyalty, favorability, and differentiation to drive future growth. In summary, Fleet’s strategy was to
Ü Focus on revenue growth;
Ü Continuously improve customer service;
Ü Invest in customer, employee, technology, and product initiatives; and
Ü Deliver shareholder value by implementing a forward thinking strategy.
Fleet planned to hire additional 1,000 tellers in order to meet the objectives above by improving customer service. However, before starting the hiring process, Fleet needed a baseline measurement of customer service throughout the branch network, the effectiveness of current teller training programs, and the efficiency of its current staffing model.
Brickstream® Value
When deciding how to measure bank service, there are three basic options.
Ü Intuition, anecdotes, and the “squeaky wheel”
Ü Finance and budget
Ü Continuous staff modeling and queue measurement
Brickstream’s® patented BehaviorIQ™ delivers the only customer behavior measurement technology that continuously captures, transforms, and analyzes branch customer activity. A combination of discrete, in-branch video and sensor technology collects customer data including how they move throughout the branch, how many are waiting, how long they wait, and the overall length of the teller transaction. BehaviorIQ then transforms this data into actionable business knowledge and provides clients with key metrics that track the effectiveness of relationship initiatives within a bank branch.
Fleet partnered with Brickstream because of our ability to meet their core requirements. First, the staffing model had to be transparent, accurate, confidential, easy-to-use, continuous, and act as a self-contained unit. Second, the benefits had to support the company’s strategy.
Ü Build Fleet brand and support the value proposition
Ü Explore additional what-if scenarios and trade-offs
Ü Facilitate regional customization of service
Ü Link wait time and customer satisfaction scores
Ü Link customer perception with service metrics
Ü Incorporate into the Balanced Corporate Scorecard
Ü Ensure branch staffing model depicts the operating realities
Solution
Fleet installed Brickstream’s Service Resource Planning and Optimization solution in 35 branches. Through the Brickstream system, arrivals, wait times, and queue lengths were continuously measured and reported to Fleet’s headquarters. These reports even became a key performance indicator reviewed by the Chairman on a regular basis.
Analysis and tracking of the Brickstream reports gave Fleet a deeper understanding of the impact wait times had on their customers.
Ü Average wait times hide the “peaks” that drive customer dissatisfaction.
Ü Customers react to individual wait time, not average time.
Ü Small business and platform customers are more sensitive to wait times.
Ü Urban and suburban branches have greater wait time risks.
Ü Customer’s definition of a reasonable wait time may differ from that of the bank.
Outcome
Besides a firmer grasp on the impact of wait times, Fleet gained invaluable information about staffing. Utilizing the reports, Fleet established a baseline of customer service performance relative to staffing. Then by implementing various staffing adjustments and measuring them against the baseline, Fleet was able to truly uncover initiatives that had a positive effect on wait times.
Through Brickstream, Fleet was able to reduce the anticipated hiring of 1,000 additional tellers to 500 and still meet its corporate wait time goals. After changing its staffing model and decreasing wait times, Fleet not only quickly realized a return on the initial investment, but also had additional savings of over $10 million in hiring costs.
HIghlighted Results
