Big bank brandishes call centre tactics

Beverley Head
Monday, 01 March 2010 16:58

Business IT - Technology

In a bid to boost productivity one of Australia's big banks has brought in the managers and technology used by its call centre to improve the way its back office staff perform.

According to Nancy Treaster, senior vice president and general manager at Verint Systems, while call centre staff productivity is often measured in minutes, that can slow to days or weeks when back office staff take over, for example when approving mortgages.

Treaster , speaking at KickStart 2010 said that call centre analysis had shown that when customers called companies to complain, the delays they whinged about were caused in the back office rather than in the call centre, 65 per cent of the time.  Now organisations were starting to roll out disciplines and technologies traditionally found in call centres into the back office in order to boost performance and productivity.

'One of the large banks is extracting management from the call centre into the back office, and moving the call centre training across too,' said Treaster.

Asked how the notoriously feisty bank unions were reacting to the move Treaster claimed; 'Lots of times the unions like this as it's seen to be more fair, more even handed. When you are doing technology tracking it's seen as more analytical and less subjective.'

Zwicka Ben Zion, managing director of Verint in Australia, said that there had been no problems with the unions in the bank and in the one federal government organisation which had also adopted the approach of moving call centre technology and tactics into the back office.

According to Ben Zion; 'Over the last couple of years this market has started to emerge. Before we targeted the call centres, now we are targeting c-level executives looking at the back office.'

Treaster said that a number of organisations were now forming quality teams, made up from staff who had worked in call centres. These teams were focussing attention on the back office to identify and then fix productivity problems in the business.

She claimed that over the last year sales into the back office of what were traditionally classed as call centre support tools had soared. Revenues from these sales had risen 104 per cent internationally and 'In Australia it grew even faster.'