Standard Bank South Africa Case Study

Business Benefits

Reduced attrition rate in the contact centre saving $2.6 million
Saved $32 million in operational efficiency in just 24 months
First call resolution improved across all queries by 30%
Winner of Gartner CRM Excellence Award 2008

The Challenge

Faced with increased competition in the market place, SBSA needed a new CRM vision to revitalize their customer experience. Hindered by 23 disparate and costly contact centers, each with their own operating processes, management and technology, the bank was struggling to provide first class customer experience. This was further intensified by a lack of a standard front-end, unstable contact management systems and agents having to traverse up to 18 applications in a single customer interaction. SBSA looked to develop a strategy which would move the bank from a product-centric to a customer-centric focus, transforming their customer experience and reducing customer churn.

The Solution

Sword Ciboodle was selected as the key component to support the customer experience transformation strategy, known as project ‘Sapphire’. The strategic aim of this project was the consolidation of 23 disparate contact centers into one virtual operation, while consolidating and standardizing multiple lines of business into one operation and solutions platform.

Sapphire provided the bank with a user friendly, process-driven unified agent desktop that reduced the number of applications from 18 to 1, and increased the agents ability to resolve multiple queries during a single transaction. By adopting a process-centric CRM system, SBSA was able to optimize processes and increase efficiency and effectiveness, which directly improved the customer and agent experience.

The Results

Over the first 24 months, Sapphire had delivered an operational saving of £32 million. The new platform improved coaching and quality assurance capabilities, which in turn has reduced the dependency on agent training and lowered the attrition rate of staff, saving the bank approximately $2.6 million in Human Resource costs.

Customer experience is now central to the bank’s customer service strategy. Empowered agents have all the information they require in one place, and as a result, first call resolution has improved across all queries by 30% and call transfers reduced by 20%.

SBSA’s processes are now customer-centric, and can be quickly adapted based on business and market demands. Most importantly, supported by Sword Ciboodle’s flexibilty, SBSA now has a cutting edge weapon to improve and expand customer experience in the long term.