Driving Contact Centre Excellence at RHB

Contact centers, today, have evolved from a very basic role of responding to enquiries, to a complex entity that supports organizations in achieving performance goals, fuelled by technological advancement. A modern day, 21st century contact center employs innovative approaches to improve customer journey by anticipating customer expectations and catering to their increasingly complex needs.

Recognizing this all-important role of its 24-hour customer contact centre (CCC), RHB Banking Group powers its CCC operations with enhanced digital capabilities and data analytics, to serve more than 200,000 customers each month across Malaysia, Singapore, and Brunei. With service excellence underscoring its core priorities, RHB has introduced several initiatives in line with its FIT22 strategic roadmap, aligned with the Group’s overall thrust in enhancing its position as a digital-centric, customer-focused financial services provider.

Through FIT22, RHB’s CCC has been empowered with digital capabilities, comprising various strategic interventions that include the execution of the “RHB way” service culture to achieve superior customer service. It has also seen the introduction of robotics and artificial intelligence (AI) to drive efficiency and productivity, the institutionalization of big data and analytics to boost revenue, and the implementation of digital channel platform (DCP) to deliver a holistic ecosystem for the benefit of its customers.

RHB Way Service Culture

With service excellence as one of FIT22’s core focus, the RHB Way Service Culture initiative provides a structured approach in building trust, delivering convenience, and creating greater value to continuously improve the customer journey. In creating a conducive and inspiring work culture among CCC agents, RHB employs advanced communication channels such as Workplace by Facebook to provide an open internal platform encouraging the sharing of knowledge, generation of new ideas, and to provide collaborative space towards the continuous enhancement of the RHB CCC performance as a whole.

Driving Efficiency through Technology

Technology continues to empower today’s contact centres with enhanced service delivery capabilities, and the RHB CCC has similarly embarked on technological upgrades to enhance capabilities especially over the past 12 months. To personalize services and increase customer engagement, the CCC leveraged on technology to establish the Virtual Relationship Manager (VRM), a tactical approach to offering customers with products and services that closely match their requirements. This initiative involves gaining a deeper understanding of RHB’s premier customers, allowing it to better meet expectations. The VRM helps RHB take a proactive step to personalize its offerings to customers, thus, building long-lasting relationships with greater value-add.

With technology as an enabler, RHB CCC implemented the Intelligent Call Routing Strategy (IVR) which strategically identifies and routes premier customer calls to dedicate dagents. This data-driven filtration process reduces waiting time by matching customers and services they require more effectively, thus, enhancing cross-selling and up-selling activities. Such enhancements have been critical in enabling the CCC to achieve high service standards, and to maintain a consistent abandoned call rate of below 1 percent despite call traffic doubling over the past year.

The IVR has also enabled RHB to offer customers selfservice options, through which they can conveniently be serviced without having to wait to speak with a service agent. The IVR helps customers to quickly check outstanding credit card balances, application status, requests for debit/ credit card PIN (personal identification number), and for card activation requests. With this in place, the CCC was able to better filter incoming calls to its general lines, and reduce the number of calls with agent interaction by 18 percent from 202,000 calls to 166,000 calls between January and June 2019.

Ramping Up Productivity

Productivity is a constant between call centres of all kinds and is indeed a key driver at RHB. Through the adoption of robotics process automation (RPA), RHB developed its unique ‘Productivity Bot’ facilitating productivity management and efficiency of its CCC agents. The CCC Apps, was developed in-house to increase agent efficiency in accessing various systems and product templates through a centralized platform making referencing easy, without the need to toggle between different systems. As a result, turnaround time in responding to customers’ enquiries is improved considerably.

The RHB CCC ties together these various initiatives and further drives a sustainable high-performance culture through the Agile way of working. With Agile in place, the CCC has been able to lower turnaround time in resolving customers’ issues on service requests through more efficient processes. In 2019, the CCC achieved 95 percent within SLA in the month of October compared to 92 percent before Agile was implemented. The self-service quick balance inquiry option via IVR, has helped reduce the need for human interaction helping the CCC to deflect about 21,000 credit card related calls to self-service mode since April 2019.

Other improvements within the CCC following the implementation of Agile include the improvement in staff utilization or productivity from 56 percent previously to 63 percent, exceeding a target of 60 percent. In addition to that, the CCC has seen an increase of 69 percent in positive feedback since February 2019. The team has been able to uphold high service standards by responding to 83 percent of calls within 20 seconds, above industry’s 80 percent. Testament to the positive impact of Agile is the NPS score which stands at 88 percent as at October 2019, exceeding the 81 percent target set for this year.

2020 and Beyond

In future-proofing the RHB CCC in 2020 and beyond, the bank is poised to implement digitally-driven initiatives that amongst others include more advanced robotics automation, LiveChat, chatbots, augmented reality, two-factor authentication, and other contact centre modernization initiatives.

Enhanced RPA and robotics desktop automation (RDA) features will enable 360-degree views of customer information to help its agents respond faster and more effectively to customers’ needs, using bots. This would further reduce manual intervention, resulting in shorter voice conversations and ultimately, reduced call volumes.

Meanwhile, the LiveChat service would empower agents with interactive functions allowing them to manage multiple chat sessions concurrently, potentially doubling the ability to address incoming call load and reducing waiting time for customers. From a security standpoint, RHB CCC’s twofactor authentication would mitigate risk of unauthorized requests through OTP (One Time Password) verification.

In future-proofing itself, RHB provides comprehensive and strategic learning and development opportunities premised on the 70:20:10 approach encompassing selflearning, close guidance and buddy systems, and classroom training. Self-learning opportunities are available through the bank’s e-learning portal reducing the duration of physical classroom training by 80 percent. With this, CCC agents have ample opportunity to upskill themselves, resulting in faster deployment of new and better equipped recruits into their respective functions.

RHB’s CCC efforts have not gone unnoticed, and the bank has been recognized through prestigious industry excellence awards that include the Frost & Sullivan 2019 Malaysia Excellence Award in Customer Experience in the Banking Industry for Contact Centre Experience, Customer Experience in Financial Services (CXFS) Asia 2018 for Best Customer Experience for Call Centre, and as recipient of the Excellent Service Award (EXSA) Award in 2018.

Strengthening its leadership position with the use of latest technologies, RHB CCC is well on its way to becoming a star in the contact centre space with its innovative approach to customer service.