Top 10 U.S. Retail Bank Transforms Lending Operations with Verint Operations Manager

Verint Success Story: Top 10 U.S. Retail Bank

With the best-of-breed Verint solution providing a new way of working, missed SLAs, excessive overtime, and burned-out employees are a thing of the past.

Results:

40%
Increase in employee productivity within the first month.
60%
Improvement in SLAs, reducing turnaround times from 7 to 10 business days to 4 days or less.
10%
Reduction in headcount through attrition.

Summary

A specialty group within a top 10 U.S. retail bank’s lending business was consistently missing its service level agreements (SLAs), even with mandatory overtime. The group identified two causes of this issue.

First, managers felt employees could be more efficient with their time, but lacked the real-time data to effectively measure employee productivity. They could not tell if team members suffered from a skill versus a will issue.

Second was a highly inefficient manual process of allocating and tracking work across teams and systems. After implementing Verint Operations Manager, the group was able to eliminate overtime, meet and exceed SLA targets, and improve employee productivity by 40%.

Want to know more? Here’s the whole story…

Opportunity

A top 10 U.S. retail bank hired a new Vice President of Operations to turn around an underperforming specialty group within the bank’s commercial lending business. The group had a complex operating environment, with five different platforms in which work was received, hundreds of types of work, each with different handle times, and no automated way of assigning and tracking work across 400-plus team members.

The group relied on three supervisor-level individuals focused solely on assigning, moving, and tracking work. This activity was not where their talents lay nor was it a productive use of their talents and time. Making matters worse, team leaders struggled to keep employees engaged and working at their highest potential in what was a highly stressful environment.

As a result of this challenging environment, the group was consistently missing its SLAs, which facilitated a need for mandatory, costly overtime daily and on Saturdays. In turn, this was a catalyst for a serious case of burned-out employees.

Solution

The Vice President of Operations’ first task was to find a solution to automate work allocation and tracking. The VP and her team crafted a comprehensive list of functional requirements and assessed numerous vendor solutions. It wasn’t until she saw a demonstration of Verint Work Allocation Bot, part of Verint Operations Manager, that she found the tool that would meet the group’s needs.

In addition to work allocation being addressed with the best-of-breed Verint Open Platform solutions, which leverage data and AI at the core to increase CX automation, the challenge of understanding how employees were spending their time was resolved with Verint Desktop and Process Analytics. Capturing real-time employee activity from the desktop, the solution enables the group to understand what employees are working on, for how long, and if the time spent is in line with performance expectations.

“Verint Work Allocation Bot within Verint Operations Manager checked all our boxes, and Verint Desktop and Process Analytics was a bonus. To know where people were spending their time was for us a crazy concept at the time.” Vice President, Operations Manager, Top 10 U.S. Retail Bank

Benefits

Operational Transformation

Just one month after deployment, the group increased employee productivity by a staggering 40 percent and eliminated all overtime. Plus, the group was able to reallocate supervisors from doing manual allocation to their intended roles while also reducing headcount by five FTEs through attrition.

Further, the group was able to improve SLA performance by 60 percent. Previously, the standard turnaround was seven to 10 business days. This was reduced to a four-day promise, with delivery often accomplished in just one to two days.

The deployment in the specialty group was so successful that the bank has since expanded the use of Verint Operations Manager into five other groups and counting. Today, this covers 26 teams located across the country, both in office and remote.

“The increase in productivity we’ve seen with Verint Operations Manager has enabled consumer banking to reallocate FTEs to more relevant work and absorb more work without raising the headcount. It is helping us keep costs down, which we pass on to our customers.” Vice President, Operations Manager, Top 10 U.S. Retail Bank

Employee Experience

Prior to Verint Operations Manager, one-on-one meetings between employees and managers, as well as much needed coaching sessions, were essentially non-existent due to excessive overtime and missed SLAs. The lack of supervisor interaction and feedback created uncertainty and only added to employees’ stress. Now, with Verint Operations Manager, time for manager/employee and team meetings is built into schedules.

In addition, the Verint solution includes role-specific performance scorecards that both employees and managers can view. As a result, employees can see how they are performing against their goals and self-adjust their behaviors to ensure they reach them. This gives employees a greater sense of control over their day and destiny. They are also more confident that their production or throughput goals are realistic, as they are based on actual handle times by work type.

Managers can use the real-time data to identify coaching or training needs, and to have data-driven discussions on performance with their team members. The operational dashboards give them views into individual and team performance, as well as trends and opportunities for improvement.

Verint Featured Solutions

Operations Manager
Leverage CX Automation in the back office to improve efficiency and ensure service and quality goals are met.
Desktop and Process Analytics
Help managers improve employee productivity, quality and compliance.