Today’s financial services firms are aggressively investing in approaches to grow their customer base while looking for ways to lower the cost of implementing an effective customer service strategy and increasing customer loyalty. As such, many industry leaders are seeing call center operations as an integral part of its total sales, marketing, and service delivery strategy.
This case study profiles one of our clients, Harris Bank, and their approach to developing their call center training and best practices--moving from a service orientation into a proactive team focused on deepening relationships with their customers through ongoing investments in customer care training and coaching programs.
About Harris
Chicago-based Harris is an integrated financial services organization that provides more than one million personal and business customers with a variety of services including: banking, lending, investing, financial planning, trust administration, portfolio management, family office, and wealth transfer. Harris is part of BMO Financial Group, a highly diversified North American financial services organization with total assets of $357 billion and more than 35,000 employees.
Business SituationHarris’ call center operational strategy has gone through a dramatic evolution over the last several years. Historically established as a service unit designed to support a network of more than 200 branches, the Direct Bank group now provides clients with a full range of products and services. The shift is yielding dramatic results.
In 2006, all the call center’s measurement goals were exceeded by a wide margin. In addition, the Harris call center team was named the 2006 Center of Excellence, an award based on their performance in 2005 when they were rated No. 1 against 17 other large, U.S. financial services companies.
Strategic Approach
To learn what drives their success; we talked with Hilde Betts, Senior Vice President in charge of the Harris call center operation and our longtime client. What follows are excerpts from our interview along with our own perspectives on what made this service to sales transformation particularly successful.
Interview with Hilde Betts, Senior Vice President, Harris Bank
Q. First, tell us about your philosophy for your call center. What role does it play in your organization?
A. I view our contact center as a gold mine because we have the most frequent call with our company’s clients, and as such, I believe we have a tremendous responsibility to deliver the organization’s brand promise. I also believe we have great opportunities to build relationships because we interact with clients so frequently. Now, as we all know, relationships can be deepened in a number of ways. Taking care of whatever the client’s needs are at the moment is always first and foremost. I believe another important part of providing good service to our clients is to take another step and ask, “Is Harris doing everything we can to help you achieve your financial goals?” I don’t see this as a sales component or call center cross-selling effort, per se, or being something separate from service. I see this as being part of the relationship-building interaction. It isn’t high-pressure sales. Our “guiding vision” is to be helpful, to discover what the client needs and to ensure that we are taking care of those needs.
Key takeaway: Define your sales philosophy. Share it with your contact center workforce as well as the entire organization.
Q. Looking back at your transition from service to sales, which elements had the greatest impact?
A. There were a number of factors. We had a multi-layered approach mapped out to help us achieve our business objectives, which included customer service training and coaching, proven customer service best practices, and performance improvement initiatives. But before we could do any of that, we needed to focus on something very intangible: we needed to help bring about a “mind set shift” for our entire staff. We called these activities “will-building” activities to differentiate them from the training or “skill-building” activities. First, we asked the question, “Do we have people who are fitting the role?” We designed a “fit to role” customer service diagnostic and training assessment, which everyone took. It helped us get a better view of how closely each team member fit their role. And, of course, it helped us identify gaps in terms of behaviors and skills that needed to be developed.
Running parallel to this initiative was a body of work that focused on understanding what made the high performers in our organization successful. We ended up creating a “high performer template,” which was very helpful in identifying what performance gaps needed to be closed for those team members who had poor “fit to role” assessments.
If someone’s skill set was not a good match with their current job, and they weren’t willing or able to develop themselves to close the gap, we connected them with other opportunities within the company.
Key takeaway: Create a team with a common vision and a mindset for sales success. Identify and replicate the behaviors of your high performers.
