One of the top financial holding companies in the country, Winston-Salem, N.C-based BB&T Corporation has a long 136-year history as a strong and stable bank. Operating nearly 1,500 financial center offices in the Carolinas, Virginia, West Virginia, Kentucky, Georgia, Maryland, Tennessee, Florida, Alabama, Indiana, and Washington, D.C., BB&T ranks among the top 15 bank holding companies in the US in terms of total assets, largely due to the company’s aggressive acquisition strategy. Since 1989, BB&T has completed the acquisition of 60 community banks and thrifts, more than 85 insurance agencies, and 35 non-bank financial services companies.
But with this spectacular growth also came inherent challenges. Industry benchmarking data revealed that they were not operating as efficiently as several of their competitors and their costs-to-serve was significantly higher than industry standards in terms of branch teller utilization. Because BB&T’s emphasis on high service quality represented a significant point of competitive differentiation, the bank had up until this point believed that their high-touch operating philosophy trumped any concerns about overstaffing.
As the dynamics of the financial industry have changed, however, concerns about operating efficiency also began to grow; industry consultants made it clear that the organization would need to find new ways to operate more efficiently if they were to remain competitive. With 31,000 employees in approximately 1,500 financial centers, even a small increase in additional resources per center added significantly to their labor costs and collectively served to drag down earnings. The central question started to grow into sharper focus: “How can we move to a leaner operating model without sacrificing our high service standards?”
“BB&T is a mission-driven organization and we owe a great deal of our success to the dedicated professionals on the front line who provide our clients with the highest level of service that they deserve,” explained John Charles Thompson, BB&T’s EVP of Branch Operations. “So we faced quite a dilemma when we were presented with the cold, hard facts that we simply had to run leaner to stay competitive. In the end, we determined that we needed to develop a more efficient staffing model and over time, gradually phase into it through natural attrition. And that meant looking at new ways of operating as well as new tools to enable us to drive higher efficiencies and productivity.”
Once the decision was made to invest in a workforce management solution, the bank formed a steering committee—a core team comprised of both financial center leaders and internal IT representatives—to drive their structured RFP process to identify the best solution provider. After performing their initial due diligence, they eventually narrowed down their short list to three industry leaders. The evaluation process called for a number of interviews and presentations to examine the specifics around overall investment costs, functionality, technology integration issues, and organizational change and training requirements, among other criteria.
“After taking all factors into consideration, we came to the conclusion that GMT Planet was the clear winner,” explained Thompson. “GMT not only offered the most complete and flexible solution for our needs, their solution also represented the most attractive in terms of investment payback period. And while the investment costs naturally played a prominent role in our decision, other factors—such as ease of implementation and impact to the financial centers—also weighed heavily in GMT’s favor.”
During implementation, the team went to work on developing a customized forecasting model unique to BB&T’s specific organizational requirements. In order to achieve precise forecasting to drive teller scheduling, the team first captured data on the actual timing standards of various processing activities within the financial centers—led by GMT business partner CAST Management Consultants—while also taking into consideration variances inherent among centers located in rural, suburban and urban areas. All told, the development team digested over 250,000 data points, unique transactions, and processes, which were all fed into GMT Planet to capture the intricacies reflecting the true operating environments within BB&T’s vast financial center network.
After the development, testing and pilot stages, the rollout to the bank’s 1,500 financial centers was completed in only about four months. BB&T University worked with GMT trainers to learn the subtleties of GMT Planet and then deployed its trainers to the financial centers to train new users. Once the phased system rollout was complete, the centers reported that they were able to ramp up the learning curve quickly and within four months after system-wide rollout, BB&T achieved their initial targets of boosting efficiencies in their financial centers. As the new workforce optimization model was adopted, the centers were able to handle the same workload with about 5 percent fewer FTEs after only the four-month mark.
With GMT Planet, BB&T discovered that they were able to boost productivity and financial center efficiency by having the right people in the right place at the right time. In time, they also found that they were able to disprove the assumption that a full-time employee was required to maintain strong client relationships and deliver high service quality.
As a client-focused organization, BB&T routinely tracks client satisfaction and service quality by administering monthly customer satisfaction surveys and utilizing mystery shoppers, among other data collection tools. These feedback measures revealed that its client satisfaction scores remained unchanged even after shifting to the new, leaner operating model. In other words, with GMT Planet, BB&T was able to achieve its over arching goal of drastically boosting financial center efficiency and carving out costs without sacrificing its reputation for stellar client service.
“GMT has truly delivered on their promises—we’ve been able to meet our aggressive cost-cutting targets to date. Because the solution is so robust and flexible, we’re also continuing to fine-tune our use of GMT Planet and refine our forecasting and scheduling models so that over the next 24 months, we expect to move to an even leaner financial center workforce, again, through natural attrition. At the end of that period, we expect to be able to deliver the same high level of service to our clients throughout our 1,500 center network with significantly fewer FTEs, representing a very significant impact on the bottom line,” concluded Thompson.
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