Award-winning CRM from Standard Bank

Following the win, Rolf Eichweber, Director of Customer Experience at Standard Bank spoke of his delight at receiving such a coveted award, which illustrated the excellent progress the bank has made in the area of customer experience improvement.

“Since our deployment of ciboodle, significant improvements have been made in the areas of customer experience, business efficiency, technology optimisation and flexibility," said Eichweber.

The CRM Excellence awards serve to highlight world-class CRM initiatives throughout Europe, the Middle East and Africa. At the awards, finalists are invited to share insight about their company’s successes and challenges, and this year Standard Bank was considered the organisation that best demonstrated the successful adoption of CRM when evaluated against the eight building blocks that Gartner consider critical in the implementation of a CRM program.

In search of stability
The largest Bank in South Africa ranked by assets and earnings, Standard Bank has 2200 seats across its contact centres, which handle over 40 million customer interactions annually. In order to help revolutionise the customer experience and retain its position in an increasingly competitive market, the bank had to replace its unstable existing CRM system, which had hindered its ability to effectively service its customer base.

To future proof their existing reputation for inspired customer service the company recognised the need to move away from its one size fits all approach to customer interaction by re-engineering key business processes from a customer perspective.

To help it achieve its goal the bank selected ciboodle, the process-driven customer interaction platform from Graham Technology, as the best solution to provide its contact centre agents with a single, unified and consolidated desktop integrated to core banking systems.

Why ciboodle?
Able to be fully integrated with all contact centre channels such as telephony, Web, email, interactive voice recognition and instant messaging, ciboodle provides an interface that allows contact centre agents to access all required information in a single central view. The software provides the ability to move seamlessly between channels at any stage, be it self-service, virtual agent or human support.

The multi-channel capability of ciboodle means that customers can be pushed towards the most cost effective channel and its flexibility gives organisations the ability to leverage existing assets.

ciboodle’s award-winning, dynamic user interface allows organisations to personalise the agent desktop to suit the context. Designed for people, its adaptive UI makes employee training easier, faster and cheaper and agents and customers a simple and intuitive workspace.

ciboodle provides all the tools required to centralise all a company’s customer interactions.  In addition to providing extensive out-of-the-box capabilities, it is also highly flexible. Built on a process-based, modular approach to managing the contact centre, ciboodle allows processes to be easily modified and created as required, creating an environment that enables fast and simple response to business change.

In ciboodle, everything is defined as a process: front-end screen, business processes, workflow processes and integration processes. Its user-friendly interface gives a clear visual impression of how a process can be changed and what impact it will have on other processes or areas of the business.

The scope of Project Sapphire was huge and required three years of planning with implementation designed to be delivered in three controlled phases. Phase one and two were completed on time and within budget and as such, preparations for Phase three are already well underway. Just 24 months post implementation, the project will be cost neutral with a projected overall saving of £16 million.

CRM success

The 360-degree view of customer interactions allowed the bank to better understand its customers’ behaviour and demographics. The bank was able to make consistent their service delivery and deliver on its brand promise. The project led to a dramatic increase in first call resolution, which improved across all queries by 30%. Average handling time fell and training time was reduced by two weeks.

Call abandon rate decreased from 3.64% to 2.55% and average call handling time decreased from 246 seconds to 234 seconds, while service level achievement increased from 82.96% to 86.09%

By adopting a process-centric CRM system Standard Bank removed waste and streamlined processes, which increased efficiency and directly improved the customer experience.

“ciboodle has enabled us to stabilise our contact centre operations and provide a scalable platform for growth and already results illustrate improved customer satisfaction scores and an overall reduction in the cost to serve,” said Marcel Hemmings, Business Sponsor, Contact Centre Integration at Standard Bank.

Standard Bank South Africa’s CRM Architecture