Workforce Management for Retail Banking

Better workforce management and labor modeling have become essential with recent challenges in financial markets.  Maintaining a focus on lean operations has become increasingly important.  Yet, this must be achieved while maintaining or even increasing levels of customer satisfaction.  Proper capacity planning requires accurate forecasting.

Reducing Labor Costs While Increasing Customer Satisfaction

KIRAN brings over 18 years of experience developing work standards with best in class forecasting and scheduling tools. Using advanced analytics with data at the unit level (store, branch, banking center, etc.) we can help reduce your labor costs while simultaneously increasing customer satisfaction scores.

Expert Forecasting

The foundation of KIRAN's workforce management solutions is expert forecasting.  In 2001, KIRAN unseated two world class business analytics firms by beating them in a forecasting competition in a Fortune 500 retail financial services giant.  KIRAN went on to develop labor forecasting and scheduling solutions that are used today in more than 20,000 retail locations around the world.  After perfecting the forecasting, queuing and scheduling algorithms KIRAN spun off its software division in 2006.  Today, KIRAN remains a leader in helping companies meet their labor forecasting and capacity planning challenges.

If you have a multi unit branch environment with 20 - 500+ locations, we have proven methods for improving your workforce optimization. Customer engagements are based on meeting each client's specific needs to solve specific problems.  Services often include:

Transaction Forecasts:

Your transaction counts will be accurately forecast at unique site level at half-hourly to daily granularity (depending on the application).

Development of Time Standards (Three Methods)

Expert Know-How: KIRAN can provide industry benchmark time standards for retail banks based on over 15 years of conducting time studies at banks throughout the world, developed with over 100,000 live customer session observations and timings.

EJ Transformation Method: Time standards can be derived from actual EJ data from your EJ files. KIRAN uses proprietary methods to develop accurate, reliable time standards from otherwise highly variable data.  This method can also be supplemented by a dynamic tracking service which can monitor branch activity against operational performance for validation purposes.

Customer Session Observations: KIRAN has vast experience deploying trained observer teams to acquire transaction time standards within branches at all levels, small to large in size, short to long in duration, based on the specific needs of  each customer.

Administrative and Non-tracked Servicing Activities

One of the biggest challenges to developing meaningful, reliable work standards for retail banking is properly accounting for administrative and non-tracked services.  Your work content allocation for non-tracked activities will be developed using tested and refined methods including work sampling, employee surveys, and classic "build up" formulations.  All methods can be validated through observations.

Maintaining Customer Service Standards

Your customer service standards can be combined with KIRAN work content forecasting to provide your customers with reliable wait times.  Your specific organizational service level goals are incorporated into our proprietary queuing methods to meet that objective, whether you have single or multiple queues. Being experts in random arrival models and simulation modeling, we have developed the most accurate methods for quantifying customer service and embedding this expertise into our client's everyday operations. As an example, KIRAN is the innovator of the “rover” supervisor that helps prepare the customers in queues, a worthwhile outcome of quantifying “customer preparedness” impact on transaction duration after customer session observations in thousands of sites.

Best-in-Class Scheduling Algorithms

Not only do we determine the right-size for your workforce (through capacity planning) but we can also provide specific insights and recommendations on how to make best use of your team through proper deployment at daily, hourly, or even half-hourly granularity. This significantly increases operations efficiency.

Whether your network comprises of 20 or 5000 branches, our scheduling algorithms have been used to meet challenges just like yours.  With over 18 years of experience in workforce management and capacity planning for banks, we will bundle the above services to meet your needs and provide the most accurate solution in a cost effective package.

Call (858) 270-9950 x200 for more information on related projects including case studies. Or fill out the contact form on the upper left corner of this page.