5 Ways Bank Branch Workforce Planners Improve CX While Managing Costs

(For part one of this series, click here.)

CX Automation is transforming the way organizations balance the needs of their customers with their service and operational goals.  Workforce Management (WFM) has been around for decades and continues to evolve to help organizations align resources to demand to ensure high levels of service while maximizing utilization.

In banks, this dynamic is a bit more complicated as they try to manage a large workforce across a distributed network of branches.

In the video, Choreographing the Bank Branch Customer Experience, we show how Kenji, a branch workforce planner, uses Verint WFM to forecast demand, build capacity plans, and provide information to branch managers, so they can ensure they are scheduling staff to handle customer arrivals and digitally scheduled appointments.

Kenji uses Verint WFM Branch Forecaster to automatically create demand forecasts and staffing recommendations for each branch in Orbital Bank’s network. With the solution, Kenji can quickly identify which branches are overstaffed or understaffed and can work with leaders on plans to improve efficiency and customer service.

Here are 5 other key capabilities Kenji can manage with Verint WFM for Branch.

1. Manage resource pools for absence coverage

Verint WFM for Branch automates many of the request management workflows, enabling employees to self-serve and get immediate responses to requests for time off, shift swaps or set schedule preferences.

The employee scheduling portal can easily be accessed on the web or mobile app, making it convenient for employees. Consequently, branch, market and regional managers can see all the requests and assign staff from resource pools or other branches to cover for the shortage caused by unexpected absences.

Kenji can use reports on the scheduled utilization of alternate staff to ensure that allocations in his resource plans are sufficient to meet expected needs going forward that account for unexpected absences.

2. Adapt staffing plans for changing roles and increase sales

As the number of transactions in bank branches has decreased, both large and small financial institutions have been deploying more “universal” workers, who can assist with transactions and support customer product and service inquiries–providing both advice and sales support.

However, deployment of these roles depends on many factors, such as the level of foot traffic, demographic of the branch customer base, the market opportunity, and more. Therefore, the workforce planner must be able to account for teller transactions vs. sales workload to build a proper position planning model for dedicated tellers, bankers and universal employee types.

Check out the Executive Perspective: Quickly Adapt Branch Staffing to Market Changes

3. Build operational tasks into branch staffing plans

A recent study¹ found that bank staff typically allocate 70% of their time to operational activities and only 30% to customer interactions.  That’s a lot of administrative work.  The branch workforce planner must build a proper workload plan branch by branch for specific administrative tasks and schedule for those tasks on a day-to-day basis.

Many of these tasks are standard operational procedures, but others can be driven by market attributes, projected staffing, or by expected transactional workload for a given set of transaction types.

4. Ensure branch staffing plans reflect their market/location and sales opportunities

The workforce planner can also use market opportunity and demographic-based attributes to define customized time standards to give more accurate results for each branch.

For example, a branch near a college would likely have shorter transaction times for the on-the-go students vs. a branch near retirement communities where the customers like to chat and enjoy a more leisurely pace.

The market opportunity data can also impact the placement of bankers and specialists in the branch. A high growth, net worth market may be able to support a full-time financial advisor or loan specialist—whereas a less affluent market may share one resource across several branches.

5. Maximize utilization by sharing branch resources with other parts the bank

Many branches are minimally staffed and still have periods of low foot traffic.  One way to maximize utilization is to schedule staff during downtimes to support other areas of the bank–such as the contact center or back office. Verint WFM for Branch integrates with Verint WFM for Enterprise, enabling the easy scheduling of branch staff to support voice or digital channels.

A branch workforce planner would be hard pressed to execute all these capabilities with a spreadsheet, or a WFM solution that wasn’t specifically designed for the branch environment.  To learn more about Verint Branch WFM, visit www.verint.com/branch.

And keep an eye out for my next blog where I dig into Tanya’s story, the branch manager in our Choreographing the Bank Branch Customer Experience video. We’ll see how easily Tanya can fill an absence, juggle walk-in and appointment traffic, and measure the pulse of CX in her branch.

1 Intelligent Banks Do More with Less, By Craig Guillot, The Financial Brand, March 18, 2024