Executive Q&A: How Citigroup Delivers Exceptional Customer Service with Case Management

A conversation with Robert Smuk, North American Operations Head for Securities and Fund Services and President and CEO of Citigroup Fund Services Canada

Robert Smuk is the North American Operations Head for Securities and Fund Services and President and CEO of Citigroup Fund Services Canada. He recently presented Delivering Exceptional Customer Service, a Citigroup case study, at the Business Process Excellence for Financial Services Online Summit with Connie Moore, Vice President, Forrester Research, Inc. Read the highlights of their Q&A and discover how your organization can improve processes that benefit your customers and your bottom line with case management.

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Incremental Changes or Revolutionary Transformation?

CM: In general in the BPM world, there's two different ways people go about looking at process improvement. One way is to make small changes every six months and get some continuous productivity increases. Another way we increasingly see is companies and executives focusing on transformation. What was the lens you looked at when you were pursuing your project?

RS: I would put our project more on the side of revolutionary change. That was because of the feedback coming in from our clients. Small tweaks we were making within our organization were helping. But in this case if you think about the majority of the business I'm talking about, there are organizations out there that still do it themselves. Not everybody has outsourced these functions. So if they were doing it themselves and if the Chief Operating Officer was wondering how many transactions they currently had that had not been transacted and it's 4:00 in the afternoon, he or she would call the person that was running that team, and be able to find that out. When you outsource, there's almost another extension of that and they feel they have lost some of the control. We wanted to give some more of the control back into the hands of our clients, or in this case also into the visibility that our prospects would have. Visibility into exactly what was going on throughout the day. To me, that was a little more on the side of revolutionary.

Selling Transformation to Executives

CM: Sometimes executives flinch at the idea of transformation. The word scares them off. Other executives say that's exactly what we need, we need a little revolution. How did you sell the idea of transformation?

RS: There were a couple of aspects to it. I really didn't have to sell the team because we knew what our clients were thinking. We were very focused on the client experience and our client and customer input. We knew that some changes needed to be made, and really it was how that change was going to improve the client relationship and client experience.

CM: What was your value proposition and how did that impact people's acceptance of the project?

RS: You do need to carefully consider the value proposition at the beginning and along the way. Since the first time we did this, we have launched into other product lines and other functions. On a couple of occasions, it was something that might have been two or three steps away from the client, and the client experience wasn't going to be changed dramatically, but there was going to be a financial benefit. You need to understand the end-to-end process and understand the people that are going to have an impact, and make sure that each of those individuals are a part of whatever process you use within your organization to make decisions. You know those are the items you've got to get on the table. You have to do it upfront. Those are basic aspects of change management. In this case, I would say get all the constituents around the table, explain what you're trying to do, and then show them what the value proposition is going to be. You'll probably have one or two people that will be opponents of it, and however you deal with that within your organization, you just need to deal with it upfront.

Empowering Customers through Transformation

CM: You've mentioned customers and keeping customers informed throughout the day. Customers are a key element of how you have approached this whole solution. Have you involved customers where they can actually touch the process or in some way change the process? If you haven't, is that something you would consider in the future?

RS: It would probably be yes to both. Yes, we have extended portions of the tool set to some of our clients, and there are some that aren't interested in it. In a specific situation where there's a transaction that comes in and it doesn't have all of the data required, we can now collaborate with our client. Secondly, reporting is another part of the solution we can expand to our clients. That can be either reports that they would like throughout the day or ones that would happen at the end of the day. So in both instances, it would be an extension of the tool set out to our clients.

CM: That's encouraging to hear because that's a very advanced way of thinking about process and thinking about customer empowerment.

Improving Margins, Global Workload Balancing and Business Continuity during Disasters

CM: What about the day-to-day process and redirecting work to different locations. Was this redirecting work really all about load balancing or was it something else?

RS: It was looked at predominantly as improving our margin. We currently have responsibility for 15 sites within North America. About half of them would be in what we would define as a high-cost market. But none of the locations within North America would compare to the price point that we would have within India. We really looked at this as an extension of our workforce but at a lower price point. That was the initial take of it. The benefit is it also does give load balancing. We've had a couple of situations in the last six years where we've had some issues in one of our sites within North America. Think about the Northeast power blackout in 2003. Being able to load balance into other sites where they were able to take on the transaction processing for us is critical. So it started off as a benefit to our P&L and at the end of the day provided the additional benefit of the ability to load balance across sites.

CM: It's a very interesting concept, not just from a getting-work-done perspective, but getting-work-done-cheaper perspective as well. Were there additional benefits?

RS: Yes. The other issue and benefit that we all have to think about is what happens if any type of disaster occurs. We've had some significant disasters that have occurred within the last ten years, and think of some of the viruses that have concerned people. In this case, the solution can provide what I would define as an extreme COB (Continuity of Business) solution for us that we can simply move tens of thousands of transactions from one site to another site and contain it.

CM: That's a very important point on business continuity. The resulting benefits seem very compelling.

Assembling the Right Process Improvement Team

CM: Let's step back then and talk a bit about how you got there, the project itself. How did you approach your project and who was on the project team for this? Who were the people that actually made it happen and what skill sets did they need?

RS: I'll start with the initial project. In this case, we did engage one of our clients because we wanted to make sure that it wasn't the Kevin Costner "Field of Dreams" that we would build it and someone would come. We had them engage with us to understand what they were looking for as a solution set. We needed people within our technology organization and our operations organization, and then we needed a partner and an organization that had talent. OpenText Global 360 had people that understood our business. They didn't need the depth that we had, but it couldn't be that we were speaking different languages as we were going through the process. We made sure that everyone believed that the success of the project was going to be based on the success of the teamwork that was going to occur.

It's Not Just About the Numbers

CM: What lessons-learned would you pass on to somebody who's getting ready to embark on this path, maybe starting with the idea of selling the business case and then how to really succeed at this?

RS: The biggest thing that I would share is when I have had other business cases coming forward to me, the ones that I have rejected focused almost solely on the financials. It can't just be about the num
bers. What are we doing with the process itself and how is it changing an experience? People can make the numbers look as good as they want. You are approving this without the knowledge and ability to look into the future. So it's got to be about the process that is changing, how is it changing, and making sure that the as-is and the to-be have been figured out in advance. Also, within an organization, what is the likelihood of that change to be accepted?

CM: It reminds me of a conversation that one of my colleagues had with a bank executive. My colleague specializes in BI and he was making the business case for BI all in financial terms. The business executive just turned to him and said I could just build another branch. Forget this technology riff. I know I can make money if I build another branch. So I think it's very eloquent that you spoke to the need to look beyond the numbers. If you just look at the numbers, you're going to be in competition with a whole lot of other projects that are looking at the numbers, and it's hard to really elevate the discussion to another level if you just focus on the numbers. The numbers are important, but it gets back to that transformative mindset. The pendulum really has swung where the customer has the ultimate power. The customer more easily than ever can walk from one company to another and will walk if they don't like how they're being serviced. I think it's very insightful and exemplary of Robert's group to see the business process that could have been just seen from a back-office perspective, and instead see it from the customer's viewpoint and the customer's customer viewpoint.