Last week the Operational Excellence conference was held for Financial Services. Over 300 people came to the financial capital of the world NY, to talk about the latest trends in delivering customer excellence and share their war stories; the good, the bad and the ugly. These stories help each of us grow our programs, focused on delivering better customer experiences. This year the theme was clear, Automation and Robotics and how the financial industry is using them to transform their businesses. And at ANZ we are no different, with our own robotics and automation program. A colleague Huw Pattinson was also presenting sharing our journey.
At every conference I attend, I look to take home three things that I can share with my team and then execute to uplift our own program. Apart from the great content that Huw presented, the three outcomes for me were:
– Process Ownership
Dietrich Fisher from BBVA compass stated that Process Ownership is something that we all know we should be doing however execution can be really hard.
Process owners are to define the future vision for the process, they are to ensure the process supports business objectives and are continually looking at improving them – Great this sounds like something that we should all be doing but to get that accountability in a large organization is difficult.
4 different models were presented; A volunteer model, joint ownership model, single owner model and a process organization model. Each with it’s own benefits and restrictions. As our business progresses up the operational maturity curve choosing one of these models and embedding it is going to be critical.
– Designing a system for embedding specific behaviours
This talk by Ewan Goddard from Voya Finacial, was closely aligned to our approach already however great to hear and reinforce. We need to ensure that Continuous Improvement is part of the planning process at a strategic level. This strategy then needs to be reinforced with metrics that change and drive behaviour. Questioning what are the specific leader behaviours that are required? What are the questions that we should be asking? and What things should we be hearing on the floor?
This was followed up with not being wedded to the standards that we implement, ensuring that we are putting in constant check points making us fit for purpose.
– Automation
The two companies that excelled here from the presentations were BNY Mellon and Citibank. These companies are not only implementing Automation, but have strong strategies and governance in place, these implementation strategies are also including Machine Learning to excel the outcomes that can be delivered. Challenging our current models, and looking at how we focus our people on work that our customers value, providing insights and delivering great service.
And finally Customer Experience is not going away, however it is now expected that we are all living and breathing it, it has become a fundamental to what we do. Karen Pascoe of MasterCard spoke about the technologies that they are deploying to ensure that they stay current with how fast the technology industry is moving and how they are using Design Thinking and Hackathons to excel this process.
Whilst this is just scrapes the surface of the presentations, it provides an overview of the trends of Operational Excellence and I am looking forward to hearing more on the outcomes of using these techniques and technologies to progress customer centricity.