Overcrowding at the Fort branch in Mumbai was leading to customer irritation.
What do you do when your bank branch becomes a fish market, where customers grow irritable while waiting in long queues, and the staff feel stressed about handling so many queries? This was what HDFC Bank faced at its Fort branch in Mumbai’s business district, which saw average footfalls of over 3,000 customers a day. Not only was this overcrowding leading to general customer irritation, but the bank could not even ensure that its best customers (Preferred and Imperia) were served better.
The answer was better lobby management, felt the bank’s Quality Initiatives Group (QIG), which defined the problem as one of high turnaround time for customers (over five minutes of waiting for key transactions), and a very high ratio of transactions to customer base (defined as average daily transactions at the branch as a percentage of the total customer base).
To turn the situation around, the QIG first mapped the situation at the various teller, enquiry and ATM counters to figure out what was causing the delays. Among the answers: a few big corporate deposits (running into lakhs) would hold up an entire line of customers who could be dealt with quicker. At the ATMs, the cash refills were being done around 1pm, just when lunch-hour customers were queuing up for cash. Solutions: shift the cash refill time to mornings, and put in more ATMs.
Says Ratan Kesh, head, QIG: “We created a bulk counter for huge sums, where someone wanting to make large transactions could go to. Also, when the capacity of the ATMs was augmented, several people started doing their transactions through the ATM rather than the branch. This reduced crowding in the lobby,” says Kesh.
Furthermore, the welcome desk helped acquaint customers with mobile banking and net banking. All this not only resulted in effective crowd management, but also enhanced customer satisfaction due to the reduced wait-time, says Kesh. Today, the average wait-time is down and the value of business done from the branch has risen from around Rs 1,000 crore to Rs 1,500 crore.
The HDFC Bank story was one of the several case studies presented at the two-day Qimpro Convention for Excellence through Improvement and Innovation being held at the Taj President in south Mumbai. The convention will conclude on Friday (today), when awards will be presented to the winners in the QualTech and BestPrax categories. While the former looks at process improvements, the later focuses on best practices in innovation. DNA is partnering Qimpro for these events. Sterlite and Yes Bank are the two main sponsors of the Qimpro Convention.
Presentations were also made by 11 other companies, among them Kansai Nerolac Paints, ICICI Prudential, Sterlite Industries, Hindalco, Tata Consultancy, DBOI Global Services, Godrej & Boyce and Reliance. DNA will discuss some of these projects
in some detail over the coming days.
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