Learning Launch

Challenge

I work for the bank. Historically we have two schemes for serving clients in our branches. For retail  clients we have a big desk with 4-5 employees. But for corporate client we have only 1 person, who  serve them. It had done because corporate clients usually do their operations via Internet and couriers.  Our managers can go to their offices for discussing new products. We did not need a big space for them  in the branch. However, 3 years ago, we have started to work with small companies and entrepreneurs,  which need to go to the bank more often, than large corporate companies do. They have not couriers,  and they cannot pay money for collection of their cash from the shops to the bank. What happened?  We have started observing situation then we have a free staff on the retail desk, but there is a queue to  the corporate manager. Retail and corporate desks have different IT programs, and different products  and services, different learning processes for our stuff. Our bank has about 400 branches. We had not a  lot of money to find new offices for our branches. It was our challenge. What to do in this situation.

We have an idea to teach our retail staff to serve corporate clients. Therefore, when we have a free staff  on the retail desk he could serve a corporate client. Our hypothesis was that It will reduce queues.  However, we have a lot of technology limitations and fears about our staff – can they remember a lot of  things in their mind, may be they will do a lot of mistakes? And our corporate clients will complain about  it? Some members of our team want to make a big project about unification IT platform, which will  prompt to our staff what to do. We understand that it will be a big investment, and we really did not  know how we could create this new program (maybe we need to take retail program and upgrade it  with corporate functions or quite the contrary). What if our hypothesis is not right and our fears is true?

Selection

Our team decided to try learning launch in one of our branch. We have created a hypothesis already.  We have many questions about how to organize work in the branch, what will be work – what not. We  choose a learning launch tools because we can do it quickly without a lot of money and it helps to avoid  risks by launching new model for all branches.  In addition, we can change some points of our  operational model during launch, learning every day from our customers and staff.

Application

During the learning launch, we wanted to understand which operations of our corporate clients would  be easy for our retail staff. What kind of mistakes and problems our corporate clients will bump when  will be servicing by retail stuff. Can we use our current technology with a minor upgrading without a  huge investment in the new platform?  Can our retail stuff serve our corporate clients quickly, not to rise  a queue for retail clients?

We started in one our branch. We have taught our retail staff how to serve our corporate clients. We  interviewed our clients after retail staff served them, and observed how our employees did these  operations. We had this experiment during 4 weeks. We experimented with different kind of operations,  changing our learning program for our staff, upgrading some technologies and redesigning some  processes (which became helpful for our corporate staff too).

Insight

By applying the learning launch tool, our team confirmed a hypothesis that our retail staff can serve  corporate clients. Queues in the branch reduced significantly. But finally, we decided to take not all our  operations but two most simple, very often needed, – cash operations and issue of banks certificates. It  was not too difficult to do these operations. In addition, clients became happier. Because earlier they  could not understand why they need to wait in the queue when they see a free staff on the retail desks  – where they go if they want to make own operation as a private client.

Good news – we decided not to create a new IT platform but to create just two buttons on the screen  for quickly jumping from retail program to the corporate program. Finally, we decided to scale this new  operational model for five branches. May be we will learn something new. Now it is in process.

Approach

What I have learned from conducting this tool is that you do not need to do all perfect and full  automatized before try it. As Claire Osorio said in her lection about Sagrada Familia cathedral in  Barcelona – it can be unfinished and be in progress but be real and impressive. And in our new  operational model we can change something later but it works now. For ours staff it became a  motivator to do something new and develop their skills. Before, our team think that only we – EXPERTS  – know how to work right and good. But, receiving a feedback from our staff,  we have a new ideas for  increasing usability some interfaces. Next time we will attract our field staff not only for the learning  launches but for early stage of design “What is”.

