30 Tactics to Improve Business Performance

Here are some of the steps I’ve seen to deliver meaningful performance improvements on workforce, customer and data insight strategies at financial institutions.

In today’s market, financial institutions are looking (again) to prepare for the tough economic climate ahead. I’ve found that a few simple, tactical changes can provide significant enhancements to improve business performance.

A Company’s Competitiveness and Ambitions are Reflected Through its Strategy

Your performance strategy should reflect the organization’s ambition, purpose and values, and define how you compete to succeed in the market. Strategy demonstrates your growth ambitions, how you drive value, how you engage customers, how you attract and retain talent and how you measure success.

Typically, enterprise strategy doesn’t change significantly over time. However, three strategy components drive meaningful impact on performance. In our experience, you can drive an increase in performance by up to 50% with a mix of adjustments to:

1. Workforce strategy
2. Customer strategy
3. Data insight strategy

A Strong Workforce Strategy Retains Top Talent

Competition and costs for good people is high (estimated exit costs are 33% of annual salary). So, retention strategies and getting the best out of your existing workforce is more important than ever.  Performance management, training, and compensation are all areas that define your workforce strategy. Optimizing these areas can be straightforward at relatively low cost.

Top 10 Workforce Optimization Tactics Proven to Increase Worker Performance

1. Design detailed success profiles for each role that define expected behaviors and skills
2. Define and measure five primary performance measures that drive results for each role
3. Set standard and stretch targets that tie to strategic goals for each primary performance measure
4. Rank performance against targets and reward the top 10% of individuals and teams
5. Provide individual/team stack ranking to encourage friendly competition (daily)
6. Share best practices from top performers through regular training sessions
7. Deliver comprehensive role based/technical training to all new hires (refresh annually)
8. Coach each individual on performance and provide help and tips (weekly)
9. Provide comprehensive training to coaches and observe/assess coaching (monthly)
10. Scan market compensation and skills data to ensure compensation remains competitive

I’ve seen this work. Once, we helped a client achieve an increase of 42.5% in dollars collected and 27% in arrangements made by delivering comprehensive collections success profiles, training and coaching.

Revisit Your Customer Strategy to Improve Satisfaction and Efficiency

Your customers are at the heart of what you do. Therefore, adjusting your customer experience strategy to ensure you are delivering great service, reliability and simplicity for your customers pays dividends. Just like the workforce strategy enhancements described above, you can implement customer strategy enhancements that don’t require significant time or monetary investment.

Top 10 Customer Strategy Tactics Resulting in Better Customer Satisfaction and Working Efficiency

1. Map the customer journey and experience so you can understand how the journey works (or doesn’t) including all the touchpoints and communications
2. Identify customer journey variations, complexity and delays using available data from the mapping exercise
3. Design the optimum omni-channel customer journey and prioritize activities
4. Regularly analyze hand-offs to reduce frequency (this way, you can handle at first point of contact)
5. Regularly analyze complaints data so you can identify recurring journey themes to address with root cause analysis
6. Introduce measures and goals across the customer journey to track progress
7. Simplify customer communications and collateral to provide clear calls to action
8. Deliver end-to-end customer experience and empathy training to customer-facing roles
9. Assign clear accountability and goals for customer experience at the product level
10. Introduce C-suite monthly participation in listening to and answering customer calls

Customer Journey Effort Results are #Amazing

Bridgeforce supported a client over a 6-month period to enhance their mortgage originations journey and prevent high drop-out rates. Using many of the tactics shared here, we documented the full journey, and then built and piloted a re-designed journey. From the pilot program, the client had enough support to initiate an overall change that was rolled out company wide.  The results were significant:

• 50% reduction in customer journey time
• £1M reduction in operating expense
• 20% uplift in lending capacity
• 68% reduction in 1^st stage drop-outs
• Calls per application fell from 50% to 5%

Tune Your Data Insight Strategy for Analytics-Driven Performance

You can improve business performance by using available data to quickly identify action steps.  While data infrastructure enhancements may be desirable, enhancing the strategy you use on data that you have available now is a simple first step. Data insight enhancements can increase performance across all sectors of the business – from employee management to collections to marketing.

Top 10 Data Insight Strategy Tactics to Increase Performance Across the Business

1. Catalog the data and reporting available and then, regularly review how it is used to inform business decisions that drive performance
2. Combine data from multiple sources to identify key customer traits that inform customer segments
3. Identify predictive attributes of customer servicing behaviors that drive optimal workflow, channel and communication preferences/strategies in servicing
4. Analyze internal data to calculate a statistical propensity that links behavioral change with loss probability, which better informs early collections strategies
5. Identify key customer/process traits that indicate a tendency for digital/self-service adoption and then use that info to drive activity toward digital self-service
6. Leverage test and learn methodology to accurately measure activities and impacts to continually refine customer-facing strategies
7. Combine data points to model a detailed cost-to-income ratio for each product, service, and channel and then use this to inform investment/withdrawal decisions
8. Define measures and data feeds to track the success of all strategic initiatives
9. Employ front-end user solutions to simplify back-end legacy data mart technology and then combine sources to make data insights accessible to all layers of management
10. Conduct periodic reviews of data and reporting use so you can simplify and refine what is provided

Bridgeforce has supported many clients to make the most out of their internal data to drive portfolio re-pricing strategies, fraud strategies, collections strategies and other strategic change to drive revenue.  Because of the client work we’ve done, we know how best to apply data models, analytical software, machine learning and artificial intelligence to drive real business results.

Results from Enhancing Data Insights (from our clients)

• 98 BPS uplift in portfolio yield from a credit card re-price by leveraging segmentation creating detailed cost-to-income calculations and analyzing statistical propensity to pay
• Reduced CRA reported error rate from 4.85% to 0.01% in credit bureau reporting by combining data points to track success and put actionable data feeds in front of agents
• 40% reduction in fraud and dispute processing time via simplifying and refining data/ reporting, automating data feeds and deploying a front-end solution to simplify back end legacy data

Drive Meaningful Impact for Your Performance

If you want to make some simple adjustments to your strategy, but don’t know how to get started, reach out to us. We have hundreds of engagements where we implemented strategic enhancements such as the areas highlighted in this blog. Bring us your current challenges and we’d be happy to discuss what your next steps should be.