customer service

Winning with Customer Service

Posted on by maryama502

 

 

Operation management in the banking sector is challenging for me since I’m holding the duties of branch manager. Last class we have learned about operation management in the service sector. I didn’t realize that what I’m doing is considered as operation management. As you all know customer wants and satisfaction is the success measure of any business; i.e. if customer left our branch dissatisfied he will be unwilling to deal with the bank and it will affect the bank reputation.

I have just faced customer complaint last week when his car loan application went into a long process over our bank departments. He was saying that his friend applies for the same in other bank and he got the car after three days only. When I contact the other department asking about the reason for the delay it was not reason that will stop processing the loan and the loan can be processed now and then the customer is going to provide us with the requested document.
What I have realized here, bank departments that have no direct customer interaction will not do their job based on customer is first, what they do basically is to make sure that all documents needed are provided.

What do you think about operations, credit and risk department? How can they be involved in providing excellent customer service?

Moreover, the customer was complaining that the customer service representative was not clear about the missing document. I have talked to the customer service representative and realized that she did not read the document properly before sending it to the concern department and at the same time the car loan were approved from three departments without realizing the missing document.
I think the problem was from all departments starting from the front line to the back line. At the end his requested was processed in exceptional bases because the bank policy prohibits processing such loan without the required document.

Do you think the bank policy is a source of not meeting customer expectations? What about exceptions? Does it meet customer expectations?

At the end, the customer gets his car in the same day he raised the complaint and he left the bank satisfied and happy. He will be dealing with the bank as his loan will last for seven years which will leads for a strong customer relationship. As you all realized the problem was from the front line at the beginning, I have explain the problem with the customer service representative and instruct her how to deal with such cases.

How can the customer service representative avoid customer complaint? Is training enough?

Return to Sender: A Growing Liability

Posted on by nadat502

With the innovation in technology and services being offered by banks today it would be logical to think that the volume of physical mail being sent out will shrink substantially seeing a corresponding reduction in the amount of return mail.  However over the past year my Bank has been facing an issue of having to deal with huge amounts of returned bank statements.

There were various reasons as to why the statements were being returned; in this case it mostly attributed to a change in banking regulation-obliging banks to print statements to all deposit accounts where previously were only printed for specific accounts. With the unanticipated amounts of mail pouring in, it deemed essential to start to analyze all the different reasons to why the pieces returned and what is it costing us. What is the total operational cost of postage, printing, handling, research and re-mailing?  What about the value we lost with returned communications? The delayed or missed payments, unawareness of bank charges and the overall customer service expenses?

The bank has already approved a project to centralize, automate and monitor return mail operations. By having all statements to be printed with bar codes and returned back to a central operation that will be able to simply scan the bar codes and capture how many times the statement has returned, and to ultimately stop printing upon the third time.  We will also be able to capture all the problematic accounts and attempt to contact the customer in different methods in order to update their information and encourage them to use e-statements.

I have highlighted one small operation that possibly was not be seen to have a dramatic impact on the banks performance but it is a growing problem and may have a huge impact in the future with our customer base growing everyday. As Head of Customer Resolution I am able to see a lot of the operational and process issues we are facing with at the bank through customer complaints, and by taking this class it has stressed the importance of how reducing operations cost is the best method to optimize in an organization. I am also looking forward to learn the importance of managing quality, and conducting process redesigns and how they ultimately lead to improved efficiency, profitability and operational excellence.

This after all is my view, so do you think our Bank is on the right track with their cost management initiatives?