Improve your bank’s contact center to better handle fraud

Having the right number of skilled agents is paramount to ensuring a seamless and expeditious customer experience. After all, improper staffing leads to long hold times, delayed assistance, and customer frustration, which can exacerbate the impact of fraud.

This article explores how you can improve your contact center planning process as part of your larger strategic workplace blueprinting strategy to ensure your customers can quickly connect with you when they need you the most. We'll illustrate these concepts with a real-world example from a leading retail bank.

The call center conundrum: managing a multitude of customer needs

Your contact center is the frontline for addressing a plethora of customer concerns. From simple banking inquiries to combating fraud on debit cards and credit cards, to resolving mobile payment issues and retail disputes, the demands on your customer service teams are enormous.

To keep delivering exceptional customer service, you must master the art of workforce planning – predicting how many calls you’ll receive and ensuring you have the right people available to help while avoiding under- or overstaffing. However, this task becomes increasingly complex when you operate multiple omnichannel contact centers around the world, with hundreds of agents working around the clock to answer phones, chat, emails, text (SMS, social media). Coordinating people, costs, and strategy across multiple horizons is inherently difficult.

Today, workforce planning strategy at most banks is reactive, done in silos, and tackled in bits and pieces by various stakeholders. It relies on cumbersome spreadsheets that provide a fragmented, static view of the business, and offer limited forecasting capabilities across timeframes, from intra-day to short-term and long-term.

The consequence?

Inefficiencies and a lack of cost-saving gains. Inaccurate demand and capacity plans lead to repeated overstaffed and understaffed shifts, resulting in decreased service level agreements (SLAs), poor customer service, redundant resources, and ballooning costs.

It’s time to break free from these constraints and modernize planning for your contact center operations.

A new era of contact center planning: moving from reactive to proactive

Forward-thinking banks are no longer content with reactive strategies. Instead, they are embracing the power of predictive insights and strategic workforce blueprinting solutions like Anaplan to tackle their resourcing challenges head-on.

Using an integrated workforce planning approach, you can forecast demand and workload with unparalleled accuracy, considering historical data, seasonality, and external factors like market trends and major events (e.g., Cyber Monday, the Super Bowl, or FIFA World Cup), which may trigger fraud spikes.

By evolving your contact center planning from reactive to proactive, you can more accurately determine your staffing levels to match anticipated demand and ensure customers receive support when they need it most.

With the right strategic workforce blueprinting solution, you can:

• Generate contact center forecasts across all time horizons, including intra-day, short-term, and long-term.
• Analyze trends against transactional volumes over time to forecast required agent capacity and skills levels
• Improve SLA and net promoter score (NPS) monitoring through skills and capacity rightsizing so you can meet and exceed customer expectations.

One bank’s journey to enhancing contact center planning

In its quest for operational excellence, a large retail bank looked to Anaplan to optimize its call center fraud operations, which received hundreds of thousands of calls each month and supported over 30 customer journeys across multiple internal and external telephony lines. The bank’s mission was clear: deliver the right support at the right moment to customers in distress.

Previously bogged down by fragmented spreadsheets, stale data, isolated analysis, and siloed decision-making, the bank grappled with redundant resources and annual budget overruns. Unsuitable staffing, a result of oversimplified demand modeling, not only drove up costs due to over- and understaffing but also diminished the customer experience.

Additional key benefits for the retail bank included:

• Improved operational efficiency: The bank can now confidently hire and assign agents for optimal staffing levels, minimizing under- or overstaffing to better manage costs.
• Higher net promoter score: By optimizing its contact center staffing, the bank can now provide its customers with the support they need during their critical moment of truth and reduce failure demand.
• Reduced risk: The bank can respond to calls quicker and shut fraud instances down promptly, helping to prevent further losses.

But the benefits don’t stop with just optimizing contact center operations. This visionary bank recognizes the potential to use Anaplan across the business to create bespoke forecasting models, integrate fraud profiling capabilities, and extend workforce blueprinting across the organization.

Begin your own workforce blueprinting journey

By leveraging a strategic workforce blueprinting solution like Anaplan, you can forecast demand with precision and align your workforce skills and capacity with your top-line business goals to drive growth and profitability while delivering a better customer experience.