Case Study

With the Spanish banking sector in turmoil, banks have to keep tight control on costs while looking to develop new lines of revenue. CaixaBank uses HPE Customer Experience solutions to help drive efficiencies and monitor process improvements as it seeks to absorb new acquisitions and encourage customers to use lower-cost channels.

Call center efficiency delivers business-wide benefits for CaixaBank HPE Customer Experience solution drives efficiencies with focus on innovation and productivity

ObjectiveReduce cost of call center operations, driving staff and customers to lower-cost channels while maintaining customer service quality

ApproachContact centers must absorb impact of new business acquisitions and ensure first-rate customer experience

IT Matters• Created a roadmap of new contact

center innovation, keeping CaixaBank ahead of the competition

Business Matters• Established new SLAs, updated every

six months, ensuring contact center operations remain in step with business needs

• Ensured detailed auditing, helping uncover process improvements throughout the business, leading to a reduction in calls and operational cost savings

• Provided the contact center capacity to absorb rapid increase in customer numbers, allowing business to consider new acquisitions

Challenge

Cost-control and consolidation CaixaBank is Spain’s leading bank. It operates in a sector under much strain, having to cope with the fallout from a collapse in the real estate market and a recession across the European Union.

The response has been consolidation and cost control. Across Spain, branches are closing, smaller banks have been acquired by larger players and, in some cases; the government has been forced to bail-out the most severely affected.

CaixaBank, while not immune to the broader difficulties, remains buoyant. It has acquired a number of regional banks and, most recently, integrated Banca Civica, a rival savings bank. This deal sees CaixaBank’s customer base increase from 10 million to 13 million.

Page 2Case study CaixaBank

Industry Banking

The challenge was to integrate the new acquisitions as efficiently as possible, move to lower cost transaction channels and rebuild confidence in the banking sector.

“There will be more consolidation to come,” says Ramiro Sanchez-Crespo, director of relationship banking, CaixaBank. “To reduce costs we need to deliver service through the cheapest channels and reduce activity through our most costly.”

Solution Drive traffic to automatic channels CaixaBank has two contact centers; one for customers and one for branches. In simple terms, the bank wanted to reduce the number of branch calls where employees call for help or advice and encourage customers to use online or automated channels.

In one year, the branch contract center received 1,016,000 calls and the customer center received 946,000.

“Every call from the branches is a non-quality issue,” says Sanchez-Crespo. “It tells me something is not working properly. We need to ensure our staff has the right access to information before calling. We want staff to be autonomous because there is an economic cost associated with them calling.”

CaixaBank works with Hewlett Packard Enterprise to manage both areas. HPE Customer Experience solutions deliver the most advanced services to continuously improve efficiency, reduce time-to-market and reduce the cost per unit delivered. HPE manages 325 agents across both sites, with six-month reviews of SLAs and contractual deliverables.

“This is a multi-year contract managed on a day-to-day basis,” says Sanchez-Crespo.

BenefitDetailed reportings The main benefit, says Sanchez-Crespo, is the level of detail in the call reports: “Knowing you’ve done 80,000 calls in the last month means nothing. It’s an invoice.”

“HPE goes beyond this with detailed analysis of the root cause of the call. This information is helping us improve our processes.”

He cites an example of a problem with the issuing of football tickets from the bank’s ATM network. The service has been in place for a number of years but the customer call center saw a 30 percent increase in calls.

HPE noticed the uptick, delved into the issue and discovered a problem with the ATMs syncing with the servers of the football clubs. “HPE came back with solutions, we deployed these and saw calls reduce,” says Sanchez-Crespo. “This is happy news.”

He says it is now HPE’s job to push customers into more efficient channels but to also ensure quality and drive process improvements. Using social media channels and increased automation via biometrics are two areas CaixaBank is keen to explore. “We have a reputation for innovation,” says Sanchez-Crespo. “If technology can deliver services more efficiently and with more quality, then we’re interested. If it doesn’t work, we’ll kill it and move on.”

He says the goal is not to abandon voice but to find the most suitable and efficient channels as consumers grow more mobile and less bound by time, device or location.

“In the future, great banks need not see their customer face-to-face. Transactions will be carried out online or via an ATM and customers will solve issues through Twitter. The branch manager should only be there to discuss the occasional problem,” says Sanchez-Crespo. “Our aim is for human advice, with transactions through alternative, more efficient channels.”

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