Lives Made Much Easier (LiMME)

Lives Made Much Easier (LiMME) is a strategic customer journey improvement project at Barclays and in 2010, Raymond Pettitt (Managing Director) and Lorraine O’Neill (Coventry Head of Contact Centre) put forward Coventry as a proof of concept site to create an environment where cultural enablers and ways of working could be altered to make customers’ lives much easier. Called BLiMME (bringing LiMME to life), a key step was to undertake 300+ customer surveys and 350+ colleague panels, determining what held Barclays back from being ‘best in class’. Performance metrics, previously focused on hygiene factors, were changed; sales targets were removed and customer metrics such as net promoter score (NPS) introduced. A new tool was implemented to provide cross-channel visibility, preventing the need for questions to be repeated or data re-keyed. “This wasn’t just a tick-box exercise” “We gave people the tools to empower them to give a better service the customer." “We moved away from a target-driven environment”.

Healthier conversations
The title of frontline sales adviser was changed to telephony personal banker
(PB) to better reflect the new performance metrics and to align with branch
roles. Job profiles were altered accordingly and personal development
documentation amended to support the change. The contact centre was
refurbished and rebranded. Sales boards were removed. Leadership training
called ‘Refresh the Best’ reinforced Barclays’ ‘4Cs culture’ (customers,
colleagues, citizenship, company) and give managers the skills to help their
teams have more meaningful conversations. Knowledge reviews measured
knowledge, accuracy and confidence when responding to customer queries;
these outputs are now used to create tailored learning solutions based on
individual need. Masterclasses are also run to help embed better
conversation management techniques, such as the use of positive language
and empathy. “Culturally, we’ve made a massive shift” “We’ve gone from a
parent-child culture to an adult-adult one” “They’re helping us understand how
we can make conversations better”.


“Speech has really helped us bring LiMME to life… we
listen to calls with personal bankers and can show the
reality… in a very factual way rather than just telling
them what they were doing.”
Pinder Sehmbi,
Pilot Team Manager


“We’re using speech analytics to find out where the
customer effort is and how we can make life easier for them.”
Raymond Pettitt,
Managing Director


“It’s not about hitting your targets; it’s about doing the
right thing for your customer.”
Katie Downs,
Speech Analytics Performance
Partner

Gaining insight through speech analytics

Katie Downs (Speech Analytics Performance Partner) was bringing Nexidia
speech analytics technology into the Coventry contact centre and ID&V was
selected for the pilot project, because it emerged as such a hot issue in
employee focus groups. Focus on fraud avoidance and security meant there
were additional ID&V requirements for customers if they dropped out of the
automated IVR verification or if they did not have a passcode, and this was a
source of frustration for both customers and advisors. Speech analytics was
therefore used to track how individual PBs positioned the new requirements
to customers and when they offered appropriate alternatives. This insight
enabled targeted training and coaching around specific elements of calls
where poor customer experience had been identified. PBs consequently
gained significantly in confidence, the new call handling behaviour is now
almost universally embedded and ID&V success rates rose by a massive
25%. PBs’ scores for setting the scene also dramatically improved, from 3%
to 96%. ID&V was selected as the focus for the pilot as this was the area
that PBs were asking for support in. “Speech analytics is the fairest way of
monitoring our performance” “The key was to run speech again at the end of
training to verify it had worked” “It’s opened our eyes and helped us to
look differently at what customers want”.


A national roll-out for speech analytics
Success in the Coventry pilot project led to the deployment of speech
analytics across the rest of the Retail telephony sites. A team of two
managers and nine analysts has been established, working in
partnership with training to ensure each project is as effective as
possible. An automated customer effort dashboard has been created to
support satisfaction improvement, based on analysis of 2,500 hours of
calls per day. Work is now underway to analyse ISA-related calls, using
speech analytics to ensure colleagues are fully prepared for the ISA season in
2012. A project has commenced using speech analytics to increase the bank’s
knowledge of customers’ savings accounts outside of Barclays. Critically, the
tool has been also used to demonstrate that the halving of customer
complaints in 2011 was the result of changed customer experience brought
about through BLiMME. “People are so excited about the roll-out” “They’re
formulating a list of things they’d like us to do with speech analytics” “ID&V is
simply the tip of the iceberg”.

• ID&V success rates up 25%
• Personal Bankers’ scores for setting the scene dramatically improved, from 3% to 96%
• Customer NPS up from 29 to 46* 
• Customer Effort improved from 66 to 77*
• Complaints volumes down 69%* 
• Employee Engagement for colleague questions up from 89% to 94%

* between start of the proof of concept in October 2010 until March 2011

Summary
Speech analytics at Barclays has underpinned a strategic drive that
is improving and simplifying conversations with customers. Part of a
wider customer journey improvement project called LiMME, this first
application of speech analytics also built on significant initiatives
that have driven cultural change in the centre. The key focus has
been to simplify customer identification and verification (ID&V),
tracking how personal bankers position the need for verification and
when they offer alternative approaches. Colleagues dramatically
gained in confidence, as a result of training and tailored coaching,
this behaviour is now almost universally embedded and verification
success rates are up by 25%.
Learn how Barclays UK Retail and Business Banking has
implemented speech analytics, alongside a cultural change
programme, to help deliver its strategic goal of making
customers’ lives much easier.


2012 Conference/2012 Case Studies/Barclays Retail.pdf