Like many banks, Huntington occasionally received complaints from customers about long lines. Branch managers typically wanted to respond by adding staff.
To determine how many people were needed, and when, the bank deployed staffing prediction software from Exametric. Now lines are shorter while the bank has saved more than half an FTE (full-time equivalent employee) per branch, said Brian Williams, vice president for quality and productivity at Huntington.
“Our purpose was to match supply and demand and get a service benefit and a savings benefit at the same time,” he said.
The tool didn’t produce many surprises – it showed that a lot of traffic came into the branch at lunchtime, on Friday afternoons, and when Social Security checks were issued. Some branches had more seasonable fluctuation than others.
What made Exametric so valuable was its accuracy.
“Exametric provides a predictive tool to match the half hour increments. You could easily miss by an hour or two and get the staffing right but the time wrong,” Williams said. Exametric also can track how long people wait and provide some objective measures. A manager might fret if a line was five people long, but if the wait was no more than three minutes, that could still be acceptable.
“With Exametric, you can adjust two primary factors of customer service,” said Williams, “your wait time and your confidence level. For example, if you want a 90 percent confidence level of three minutes or less that will take higher staffing than an 80 percent confidence level.”
Staffing right also leads to happier employees. Tellers don’t want to be bored, nor do they want to be overburdened by long lines of impatient customers who are short-tempered by the time they finally reach the teller window. Getting the levels just right can improve employee retention.
The optimum service time can depend on the market, said Jodie Cox, vice president of sales at Exametric. For high-net-worth customers, a bank might aim for 93-3 (93 percent in three minutes) while customers in a rural market may have more patience.
Exametric has built its predictive engine on Microsoft technology including Windows 2003, IIS, SQL Server 2000, and .NET.
“Our forecasting engine is where we take all the information on transactions – at the tellers, platform, or drive-up,” explained Cox. “We map that to the amount of time it takes based on the unique attributes of each branch.” If the customer bases are urban, rural, senior citizens, or people who are not native English speakers, that can change the amount of time for a transaction.
The application works only if the bank staff uses it, and they have to see its continued value. Credibility is key to adoption by branch managers, Cox added. Exametric has better than 95 percent utilization among the people responsible for scheduling, whether it is the branch manager, senior teller or a scheduling manager. At the corporate level, users can slice and dice the information, such as by changing the service level, and see what it will do to staffing requirements. Comparing actual schedules against Exametric forecasts also shows if a branch is overstaffing or understaffing.
A scheduling engine shows the list of associates, their schedule requirements and forecasting. Recently Exametric responded to user requests with a module that makes a record of when staff actually worked. That record can then be linked to a system like SAP to automate the link between scheduling and payroll. A manager reviews the records, signs off, and the data goes to SAP.
At one branch, Exametric said two more tellers were needed Thursday afternoons. The branch manager didn’t believe it, until she watched the lobby as it filled up with construction workers clutching paychecks. A construction company had opened an office down the road and casual observation had missed the impact on business.
Another bank realized that its long lines were created by Mexican cross-border traffic. They put in separate English and Spanish lines and set out a table with all the necessary supplies such as deposit and withdrawal slips and information cards, and offered information on a clipboard with an LED calculator. Through these steps, the branch cut waiting times from 40 minutes to five.
One bank, added Cox, found a 50 percent reduction in attrition.
“When you are in a big part-time environment, allowing part-timers like students a schedule they can live with is important. In focus groups, branch managers light up when they see a scheduler that can block out time for classes. People want to know when they will work and when they have breaks. They want to be busy when they are working, but not overworked, and they don’t want to have their schedule jerked around,” Cox said.
One of Exametric’s biggest bank clients posed a challenge – if Exametric could predict staffing requirements two or three months out, why not 12 months? Then the bank’s human resources department could plan its hiring. Now Exametric is offering longer-range forecasting, as far as 18 months out.
“We are focused on the branch, but we could do it with call centers or item processing,” said Cox. “We don’t come in promising to cut head count, we just put the people where they are needed. The business of workforce management has been around for awhile, but what we bring is more advanced that anything else that is out there. Microsoft developers have wrapped up the expertise in software.”
www.huntington.com
www.exametric.com