Success Stories

The Commonwealth Bank Delivers Exceptional Customer Service Using infraEnterprise

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A Financial Services Leader

The Commonwealth Bank Group is one of Australia's largest domestic banking and financial services organisations, and the most recognised brand in the Australian financial services industry. Its distribution network is the most extensive in the country. It is one of the largest listed companies on the Australian Stock Exchange and is included in the Morgan Stanley Capital Global Index. With more than 31,000 staff, the Commonwealth Bank is also one of Australia's largest employers.

The Commonwealth Bank's Service Transformation

In 2002, the Commonwealth Bank embarked on a 'service transformation' that refocused all operations on the customer experience. The Bank restructured, creating vertically integrated business divisions and realigning head office functions to support customer facing areas. Each division was challenged to excel in customer service, through consolidation of operations, process improvement, and smarter and more efficient use of technology.

Business Challenge: Focusing on Service in Everything we do

The Commonwealth Bank's diverse range of products and services includes providing transaction services (payroll, stop cheques, fees, traces) to some of Australia's largest corporate and institutional organisations. These clients are the 'top end of town' from a financial services perspective, both because of the volume and complexity of their financial requirements and because they are a major and growing profit centre for the Bank.

John Filetti, the Commonwealth Bank's Executive Manager of Service Delivery says that, "At the corporate level of banking in particular, the differentiator between us and others ultimately comes down to the service we provide. The product set between banks at this level is essentially the same, so we are continually monitoring and looking for ways to improve the service."

With transaction services being heavily process based, an obvious means to delivering improved service was to improve process delivery. "Ninety per cent of calls coming in to our corporate call centres are answered within 10 seconds, so we were already providing very good service in that area" says Filetti. "Clients deal exclusively with the same support officers, and we always follow through. The area where we saw an opportunity for continual improvement was in the process cycle turnaround time - the amount of time it takes to actually stop a cheque or perform a trace."

The Commonwealth Bank achieved this with a 'people, process and technology' approach: specifically by consolidating support operations, implementing a best practice methodology (Six Sigma), and using the infraEnterprise software to put it into practice - tracking, monitoring and reporting on each part of the service process.

Simple Processes that are Fast, Accurate and Efficient

Within the Commonwealth Bank, each client request that comes in to the Client Delivery area becomes part of a continual improvement cycle defined by Six Sigma - define, measure, analyse, improve and control - that involves infraEnterprise at every point.

Support officers log requests into infraEnterprise and provide clients with a reference number. Reports are generated from the system and used to identify areas for improvement, adjust service levels, and provide feedback.

Of the approximately 400 people in the Client Delivery area, some 300 now use the Infra system. Officers record all transactions and give a call number to clients, giving them an instant point of reference as the call progresses through the Bank. There is a profile in infraEnterprise for anything a client requests.

Using Technology Efficiently and Smartly

The implementation of infraEnterprise followed a bank-wide review of all existing applications and investigation of the market for innovative technologies that would support the Commonwealth Bank's service initiatives. Built around a best practice framework, infraEnterprise was selected as best able to support the Commonwealth Bank's clients.

Prior to implementing infraEnterprise, transaction services for corporate clients were provided by a number of support centres, each focused on a particular function and with a different way of doing things. The centres were also using two different systems for recording transactions, which made it harder to gain visibility across the whole operation.

As part of the service transformation initiative, the support centres were consolidated into a single unit at the Bank's Burwood offices, which Filetti says "allowed us to achieve economies of scale across a number of areas". At the same time, the new centre standardised on the infraEnterprise application.

Measuring and Reporting on Service Delivery

The Client Delivery area maintains a close contact with the Commonwealth Bank's Relationship Bankers who provide high level management of corporate client accounts. Relationship Bankers ensure the Bank meets its predefined service levels with clients, and use the reports generated out of infraEnterprise to reflect its performance in responding to requests.

Reports generated from infraEnterprise provide details such as the breakdown of the types of transactions being processed, and the amount of time it takes to progress through each point. "If a call is transferred outside of the Bank to another institution," says Filetti, "we can see how long it takes to come back. And when we change a process, the reports show us how that affected the cycle time."

The measurement of service before the implementation of infraEnterprise had been largely perception based. however this was no longer appropriate in the highly competitive market of corporate banking, where clients pay fees and have high expectations of the service they receive.

Moving Beyond the Standard Service Desk Role

Even though Client Delivery within the Commonwealth Bank is an operational area, the emphasis is on providing a total service. There is no imperative to minimise the length of each call. Instead, the transaction support centre acts as the front line for gathering and analysing the data that is crucial to the customercentric organisation.

Says Filetti, "infraEnterprise plays a key role in ensuring we capture all the details of our interactions with clients, which we feed back into continual process improvement."

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