Workforce Optimization: Using the Right Employees at the Right Time

We've all had the experience. You dash into the branch for a quick transaction, but end up standing in a long line while one teller serves customers, another works away in her station not making eye contact, and several windows sit vacant. It's equally frustrating to contact the bank by phone, only to be placed on interminable hold.With confidence in financial institutions currently in serious question, an understaffed branch or contact center is definitely not a good retention strategy. Some managers play it safe by overstaffing, sending costs out of control just when every expense is being scrutinized.

Branch managers who need to focus on building their business instead find themselves spending time manually juggling schedules. Unfortunately, they more often than not miss the mark due to incomplete data and pure guesswork as to how much activity the latest marketing initiative will generate. The result: long customer lines, employees spending idle time on the company clock-or both.

Boosting Efficiency While Reducing Labor Costs The advent of enterprise banking solutions paired with workforce optimization automation can help managers better forecast staffing needs based on historical data, service objectives, seasonality and other factors. In fact, 12 of the top 20 North American banks have made just such an investment, with results that go beyond increasing efficiency and saving money.

One Southeast financial services company with assets over $1 trillion is reaping big benefits-as are its customers. Upon implementing a workforce optimization solution, the bank began serving two to five percent more customers within their established service-level goal, and today serves 85 percent of customers within five minutes. Bank-wide, the institution improved wait times by an average of 25 percent-and by as much as 40 percent in what they identified as "troubled" branches. As a bonus, supervisors slashed the time spent on scheduling tasks from hours to just minutes each day.

When banks rely on enterprise banking platforms, details of every customer interaction are captured, allowing the workforce optimization application to retrieve pertinent data about volume on a half-hour by half-hour basis. The tool evaluates historical data that reveals, branch-by-branch, how traffic ebbs and flows over time, factoring in seasonal influences that can cause normal patterns to spike or plunge.

The combined enterprise platform and workforce application also take into consideration the bank's service-level agreements, enabling employees to differentiate between the time devoted to VIP customers versus low-profit account holders that the institution may wish to redirect to the online channel. The enterprise system is continually feeding data to the workforce solution, which keeps refining the bank's intelligence about traffic patterns.

The newer applications on the market take into account all variables in an employee's day-meetings, administrative duties, reporting-and not just direct customer-related time. This ensures that decisions are based on realistic data so staffing problems can be solved, not exacerbated.

Sales Up, Headcount Down At a $1 trillion Western-based bank using the combined enterprise platform/workforce application, the effect on customer retention was commensurate. The reported 1 percent improvement in retention translated into a $20 million increase in annual net income. In another case, this time a $185 billion bank in the Southeast, installation of state-of-the-art workforce management software resulted in a 200 percent increase in sales per full-time employee (FTE).

However, savings is not always about eliminating headcount. Many institutions have found that they are able to redeploy their most productive staff to higher market opportunity areas, while gradually reducing salary costs in lower opportunity areas. One institution in particular was able to implement a staffing program that increased lower-cost, part-time help from 8 percent to 22 percent.

Right-Sizing Becomes a Reality Proper staffing is imperative because it has such a great impact on the quality of service and containment of costs. For too long, financial institutions have had to rely on guesswork and manual processes to plan for their labor needs. With an enterprise platform that consolidates complete transactional data in one repository, along with workforce optimization automation for forecasting and managing workloads, banks have better control over budgets and the service they provide.

Drew Lamparello is director/product management, branch solutions, for S1 Enterprise, a division of S1 Corporation. Daryl Demos is general manager, enterprise solutions group, Verint Systems.