Real Transformation, Real Results

It’s early Friday morning and all the hotel staff are in their daily briefing. Occupancy is at 80% so it’s going to be a busy weekend. Several VIP guests will be staying. There is an AC complaint in room 412. Another guest is arriving who has a bad back and needs a special mattress. How is the kitchen doing – do they have enough eggs?

This daily briefing keeps everyone focused and on point, it’s a brilliant way of engaging a team and encouraging them to plan in detail for today and tomorrow, adapting to the constantly shifting demands in hospitality. Flexible, reactive and a great way of sustaining excellent, customer-focused service.

We were brought in by this global hospitality group to improve their procurement processes. It currently took six months to onboard a new supplier which, for a dynamic and responsive hospitality group, was far too slow. The procurement process didn’t reflect their culture of continuous improvement so we redesigned it for them so they were better able to respond to new trends and flex their offering around customer demand. It was the first of three engagements we’ve undertaken for this group and we look forward to more!

With green lights across its internal scorecard, meaning everyone was hitting their targets and everything was running ‘as it should’, this global bank needed to understand why its customer ratings were the lowest of all its competitors. This organisation had spent millions of dollars digitising processes, but the return on investment was poor and customer feedback was extremely negative.  They were the slowest in the market, inefficient and expensive.  They asked us to help find out what was going wrong.

We examined four specific customer processes relating to financing trade across multiple markets. We also spoke to around 30 customers in different markets face-to-face. Some of these organisations had been clients of this bank for over 20 years but no-one had ever asked them about their experiences. They may have enjoyed corporate hospitality, but no-one asked them about the service they were receiving.

Then we mapped each of the four processes from end to end, identifying where things were delayed, asking why requests were sent back and forth, finding the inefficiencies.  Each element of these processes was delivered by a different team who handed off to the next team and considered their work complete. No-one followed up to see if the work they had handed off was sitting there for three weeks. No-one had oversight of the entire process which pinged back and forth across multiple countries, visiting one particular city four times.

Often organisations outsource or create teams in low-cost economies because they think it will improve productivity.  Sometimes it works, in this case it ended up costing the bank more time, more money and was a major factor in why the whole process was so extraordinarily inefficient.

We redesigned the entire process and reduced the time for each of the four processes by 80%.  From the customer perspective, productivity more than doubled. After the success of the initial project, we were given the mandate to replicate this work across the trade business for the whole bank.  Purely in terms of efficiency and improvements this work generated a USD$50M benefit to them, not including the revenue increase.  Customer feedback was transformed from worst to ‘best ever’ and their own benchmarking showed they were beating all of their regional competitors.

In the highly competitive world of corporate banking, the speed at which accounts are set up and opened is a key indicator of efficiency, responsiveness and customer service.  If the account opening process is complicated and slow, it creates a poor first impression and sets the bank’s reputation in the customer’s mind. 

A global bank had a huge backlog of applications which development corporate account openings were taking anything from two weeks to a month.  When we analysed the process we could see that every customer was being asked to provide proof of address, proof of identity etc. even if they were an existing customer of the bank. It took the same amount of time for customers to open a second account as it did their first.  This meant there was no benefit to being an existing customer and no reward to loyalty which led to poor customer satisfaction ratings.

After mapping the value stream for the entire process, analysing the hand-offs, understanding the customer journey and their experience, we redesigned the whole process putting the customer experience at its heart.  Post-implementation, across seven markets in Asia, this bank’s corporate account opening was the fastest in the world. 

After a series of new product launches that had failed to move the needle on customer satisfaction or deliver a significant ROI, a large health insurance provider asked us for help to develop a new cashless hospitalisation product.  This new policy would be used when the customer needed to stay in hospital and, rather than pay the bill and reclaim it from their insurer, the invoice would be sent direct to the insurer by the hospital.  The target for this product was for a USD $100m ROI.

We looked at the process for new product development and it was chaotic, bouncing between different teams multiple times and every time a small change was made it had to be reapproved by every single team so it took 12-18 months to finalise. Throughout this complex process, no-one was actually talking to the customers to find out whether these new products were something they wanted, so it was perhaps unsurprising that their efforts at innovation were failing to hit the mark both financially and in terms of customer satisfaction.

We talked to customers and the insurance company’s customer-facing agents and found out that one of the key measures for deciding whether to buy this type of policy was how many days in hospital it covered. Most policies offered three days. The data told us that 99.9% of this company’s policyholders’ hospital stays were less than three days, so we suggested that the policy should offer five days to make it appealing and competitive by providing coverage that no other insurer did at the time and be highly differentiated.

When talking to customers it became obvious that no-one stays in hospital a moment longer than they have to; it’s not a hotel, and most people just want to get home where it’s easier to rest and recover. The data backed this up showing that almost all hospital stays were under three days. The CEO was extremely nervous but trusted our analysis and rationale and a month later the product was approved.

One year after its launch, this product had the highest market share in its category.For the first time ever, a new product delivered on its financial target and the company’s NPS score went through the roof.We then added little touches to premium customers like sending flowers and a card from the insurance agent who had sold them the policy – a small gesture but one that helped build customer loyalty.