Creating an engagement program of excellence.
After the highly successful implementation of their new branch design and experience—where 96% of customers surveyed said they “loved” the new design—we engaged in a post-implementation audit to identify challenges and opportunities for improvement. While the new design and overall experience was successful, BOH was not maximizing the potential in two key areas: the layout of the new branches and the implementation of the new service engagement with a higher focus on advisory over transactions. We identified areas of improvement in their processes of planning of new branch and in specific challenges in the day-to-day of the new financial centers.
Over the course of the next year and half we worked with BOH to improve their financial center planning process to ensure more successful layouts that fully realized all of the new thinking, and we developed a comprehensive new service program for their front-line staff. The program was structured in three books beginning with the story of Bank of Hawaii that narrated the history and value of BOH on the island of Hawaii and to its neighbors. Book two introduced the new service program strategy in a narrative form that was intuitive and tangible for new hires and existing staff. The conversational approach creates a dialogue between BOH and the individual and explains their purpose and value, and how to live and deliver that each day. The third book builds on the previous two and goes into detail on the new platform of the financial centers, the roles, choreography, tools and technology. It provides clear and simple direction on what each person does and provides numerous tangible insights on how to deliver service excellence. Each of the books include individual and group exercises to test and practice the the new learnings.
The driving force behind the new service program was from an insight gathered during our audit that the front-line staff were often people working more than one job that were not financially well-off and/or often were not financially literate. We were asking people who struggled to manage their own money to be advising, or engaging with customers about things that they themselves were not well informed. We needed a program that would recognize this as both a limitation on expectations and a challenge to try and overcome through education and internal staff program development.