Building a bank that can surprise and delight with Power BI

When Metro Bank opened in London in 2010, it was a brash competitor in a seriously traditional industry. The vision? To redefine the relationship people have with their bank by innovating customer service. With such offerings as seven-day-a-week store hours and lightning-quick service — a customer can open an account and get a debit card within minutes — the bank built a foundation for fast growth, doubling in size year after year and soaring to more than 500,000 customer accounts.

But with that growth has come a need for deeper and more detailed information about what customers want and need — how they interact with the bank’s services, including stores, online, telephony and mobile. Metro Bank needed a business intelligence (BI) solution that could quickly and accurately provide information to guide analysis and decision-making. Microsoft Power BI gave Metro Bank what it was looking for, with interest.

A focus on customers

“We set out to create fans, not customers,” says Bruce Rioch, head of Business Information and Customer Systems at Metro Bank. “We want to surprise and delight. We want to be the bank that our customers tell their family and friends about — the bank that offers amazing customer service and has a simple, understandable proposition.”

To provide an innovative, personalized service, Metro Bank needs to capture rich detail about its customers, from how long it takes to resolve their questions via telephone call centers, to identifying peak times for transactions conducted via the bank’s mobile app. And those details need to be clear and easy to understand, and available to the right person at the right time.

“As we’ve grown, more and more people have been asking questions about how effective or efficient the service is, and how well we are providing services,” Rioch says. “We struggled along during the first few years; we had what we needed. But as we've grown bigger, the question has become ‘how on earth do we provide the right information to the right people at the right time?’”

A system that looks familiar

Metro Bank decided to implement Microsoft Power BI because the solution integrated easily with the bank’s existing Microsoft stack, and was easy for colleagues to quickly learn and personalize for their daily needs.

“Power BI is our only BI solution,” Rioch says. “We had a solution previously that was fine for us as a brand-new startup organization. But as we grew, we needed something more dynamic, more visually appealing and more user-friendly for our colleagues. Power BI fits the bill in all of those respects.”

Metro Bank uses Power BI to track customer interactions, internal metrics and more:

•Call center operations. Power BI enables Metro Bank to track call volume, service levels, customer demographics, call times and shift scheduling. Reporting data is refreshed each night so colleagues have a clear picture of the previous day, weeks, months or year.
•Mobile and Internet banking. Colleagues can analyze data including the volume and types of transactions customers are performing online, the devices they use, and peak activity times throughout the day. “We get a real sense of how the channels are growing, and how they're being used by our customers, and what services they use once they're inside that service,” Rioch says. “Which is quite important because it helps us direct what we build next.”
•Customer dissatisfaction reports. Metro Bank can track customer complaints, including the rate of open complaints per 1,000 accounts, the time it takes to resolve them and the departments involved. One key feature is the ability to flag the most urgent complaints so that colleagues can take steps to resolve them before the deadline for reporting an outstanding issue to regulatory bodies.
•Staffing and workload planning. Power BI collects data on peak activity times in bank branches, types of transactions and other customer activity details, enabling Metro Bank to plan staffing to meet customer demands — for example, identifying the busiest hour of the busiest day of the month per branch — and help ensure quick, efficient service.

Rich detail, easy to visualize

By collecting rich detail and making it easy to analyze through personalized dashboards, Power BI helps bank colleagues identify problems before they can affect the bank’s relationship with the customer. Colleagues can combine details from account activity, data from customer satisfaction surveys, branch traffic patterns and more to understand which proactive solutions can make the biggest difference to the customer experience. Similar survey data offers insight into the employee experience, or what Rioch calls “the voice of the colleague.”

“The internal survey is built out of the dashboard,” Rioch says. “In the past it would have been all spreadsheet-driven; this year we've been able to display the colleague results really visually — and fantastically."

As a participant in the Power BI Preview, Metro Bank is also working with Microsoft developers to preview and test new features and offer feedback on functionality. The bank’s input helps shape the future of Power BI. And the dynamic program provides frequent updates, helping Metro Bank continually improve its customer service and offerings built on new capabilities.

“We use Power BI for everything,” Rioch says. “We love this product.”

Source: https://customers.microsoft.com

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