M & I bank is an organisation that has its customers as the main focus. This is why the major spheres they targeted during the improvement program were sales and customer service processes (OpenSpan 2011). The bank has always provided its clients with advanced customer experiences, yet they were in need of special tools that would help the organisation to integrate and coordinate the functions of their back and front offices in reference to customer service. Besides, the leaders of the bank intended to maximise the efficiency of the working processes. For that they needed to eliminate needless and time consuming tasks and replace them with faster and more innovative operations.
The managers noticed that one of the factors that held back the working process at M & I were multiple paper and manual processes as a big amount of data was still stored in form of printed and written down documents (OpenSpan 2011). The large scale thinking applications the bank had used previously provided no control over the operations and little enhancement could be done. The managers realised that what they required was a tool that could increase the speed of the bank’s front and back offices working process, improve its efficiency. Besides, it all needed to be done in a simple way without wasting too much time on reorganisation.
The managers conducted a professional discussion and identified 18 transactions that they needed to transfer to the frontline (OpenSpan 2011). For that they started to use OpenSpan automation tool which is specifically designed to help the banks coordinate people and technology optimising the interactions between bank employees and applications (OpenSpan for Banking and Financial Services 2015). OpenSpan provides solutions concerning the control over operations costs, the improvement of customer service, risk management, and revenue generation (OpenSpan for Banking and Financial Services 2015).
Having adopted OpenSpan automation tool, M & I bank launched a test period deploying operations enhanced by OpenSpan in just a few branches for 3 to 4 weeks. As the innovation showed success, the tool started to be employed by all the other M & I branches. OpenSpan enhanced the business functionality of the bank’s systems and operations and showed impressive results right away. After years of using OpenSpan M & I bank managers started to develop more applications and automations. The tool allows developing a concept or a prototype approach, testing and deploying it within short periods of time. As a result, the adoption of OpenSpan improved the customers’ experience at M & I, made the duties and working process of the bank employees easier, and secured the organisation from the risk of fraud.
One of the main challenges facing the modern banks is the quality of customer service they provide. This aspect is extremely influential since it is responsible for the attraction and retention of clients and capitals. To maximise the quality of customer service the banks and financial organisations are to minimise the time spent processing and finding the information needed to assess the customers’ needs. This includes such processes as communications (emails and fax), access to archives, data input and processing, information provided by back office (investment, trade confirmation), and responses of the front office (Bank efficiency up, customer churn down 2015). The inclusion of several different departments and workflows make customer service slower and less effective.
References
Bank efficiency up, customer churn down 2015. Web.
OpenSpan 2011, M&I Customer Case Study – Bank Process Improvement. Web.
OpenSpan for Banking and Financial Services 2015. Web.