Standard Chartered Bank Singapore transforms customer and employee experience capabilities

The bank has simplified the complex technology landscape and improved business efficiency. 

The same technology that simplifies life by providing more functions in each device also complicates life by making the device harder to learn, harder to use. This is the paradox of technology. — Donald Norman, The Design of Everyday Things (1988). 

Any business that aims to become more successful knows the value of keeping pace with technology and improving it over time, thus leveraging modern technology has become indispensable. Nowadays, the modern and innovative technologies used by contact centres have become quintessential to delivering a seamless user experience. 

Over the last decade, Standard Chartered progressively acquired multiple technologies for its contact centres to meet ever-growing business demands. This resulted in an increasingly complex technology landscape, which limited scalability, caused discrepancies in interoperability, and led to challenges around governance and reliability. These and other factors compromised operations, employee experience (EX) and customer experience (CX) resulting in the “paradox of technology”. 

With the growth in digitalisation and rapid changes in technology, Standard Chartered recognised the need and seized the opportunity to adapt and hence initiated a partnership with Avaya. 

The successful transformation began with the adoption of Avaya OneCloud Private solution, a powerful, secure, and flexible cloud entirely dedicated to enterprises seeking high performance in large scale operations, speed for delivering unique businesses requirements, and converging with security and compliance mandates. It was used as the foundation to develop a new Global Contact Centre Platform (GCCP) which would allow Standard Chartered to create a consistent view and understanding of its entire telesales operations, including availability, cost of operation, and effectiveness, ensuring a consistent CX across the markets it serves. 

Standard Chartered Bank’s transformation aimed to build a bold and futuristic architecture to create a new future-proofed Global Contact Centre Platform. It has implemented this new solution in 5 key markets in Asia, including Singapore, and plans to roll it out in 5 additional markets in the next few months.

With the Avaya OneCloud Private, the bank saw a 22% growth in how it connects with customers, alongside an improvement in the overall revenue per agent, strongly reflecting the improvement in the technology stack. Improved call back management, instant SMS and email, call strategy execution, and automated scripts readout for Terms & Conditions to ensure zero defect and compliance error are other benefits in telesales that the bank enjoyed from the implementation of the platform.

The GCCP has accelerated the time the bank takes to authorise and launch new applications, initiatives, and functionalities. With enhanced analytics and simplified processes through centralising governance, the whole system is more agile and responsive to market/technology changes, enabling the bank to further establish omnichannel capabilities. 

With the new GCCP platform, Standard Chartered also achieved improved information security, as the platform enhanced data security and encryption in alignment with its guidelines on information security, and ensured that the bank always meets compliance and regulatory commitments set by the countries in which it operates. In addition, the global architecture of the platform is designed to contain an overview of all countries’ dialer applications, which are centrally hosted in the bank’s regional data center and business continuity site, which allows multiple countries to access the dialer application over a wide area network (WAN) with minimal edge infrastructure on-site and supports the bank’s move towards providing an on-demand or a hosted solution model. 

Standard Chartered also witnessed a faster and more effective change in service management. The platform’s reusable features and functionalities across markets improved cost management with the new pay by use model under AVAYA’s unique managed services model helping the bank achieve significant savings in the build and run cost. 

The bank’s vision for establishing its Contact Center has evolved over the last few years, where there is continuous change management to bring in greater efficiency and resilience to the ongoing dynamics in the Banking and Finance Industry. 

For this, Avaya and Standard Chartered Bank were awarded with the SBR Technology Excellence Awards in the ICT - Banking category.

“This Award reflects the successes we envisioned in our journey towards attaining excellence. We are very proud to be recognised for this successful transformation,” said Standard Chartered Bank. “The SBR Technology Excellence Award strengthens our belief and commitment that what we have built and continue to enhance is helping us create a better user and customer experience."

Watch the interview below to know more about their winning project: