Utilising Bank Branch Talent as High Street Footfall Decreases in 2022

In recent years we have seen a dramatic decrease in people shopping on the high street. An increase in online retail, a global pandemic, and now a possible recession are some of the major factors contributing to this trend. This means, fewer people are taking the opportunity of being “in town” to drop in at physical bank branches. The reduced number of people visiting banks has also caused a drop in the amount of work for employees working at these branches, which due to health and safety regulations have regulatory staffing levels. Therefore, employers are looking for ways to utilise the downtime their workers are getting (And if they aren’t, it’s a missed opportunity!).

Opportunities Presented by Decreased Worker Utilisation

Employees working at physical bank branches have had considerably less face to face customer work as of late. Queuing Theory, which is the study of the wait times in a queue is used (in this case) by banks to decide the optimal number of bank tellers at a branch to reduce wait times. But, this has a tendency to overestimate the amount of human capacity required.

This overestimation along with the factors mentioned above offers a unique opportunity to utilise those employees to do work that they wouldn’t typically do. Businesses can increase employee utilisation by assigning them back-office work when there are no queues of clients waiting in the branch, or no calls needing to be answered.

How to Get the Best Out of Your Employees

A low utilisation rate  can cause the branch staff to feel undervalued. Additionally, employees seek value and purpose at work and want to have a strong sense of their objectives. Utilising customer-facing employees for back-office work during downtime can be extremely beneficial to your business. A higher productivity and utilisation of latent branch capacity will allow you to save on costs as you will need to hire fewer employees lost through attrition.

Assigning customer-facing employees back-office work can do wonders within your organisation. But, deciding what tasks to delegate to whom and when can be tricky. Team leaders/managers may be required to oversee this delegation of tasks, which can be time-consuming. To solve this problem we have developed the OPX solution that can assign tasks to the most qualified person automatically based on your service levels and the staff members skills.

What Tasks can be Allocated to Branch Staff

Your branch staff can be much more effective than you may think. However, it is important to note that they may not be able to perform all types of back-office tasks. Few factors that you should consider when deciding what tasks can be allocated to them:

• Skill level: Certain tasks may require specific skills not everyone possesses. It is important to ensure that the tasks being assigned to employees can be performed by them.
• Handling time: Tasks that have short handling times would be a better fit for the branch staff as they also have their day-to-day responsibilities.
• Interruptible: One of the branch staff’s main responsibilities is to tend to clients coming into the branch. So, they should be able to pause the task they have been assigned if their attention is needed by a client.

How OPX can Help You with Your Operations Management

OPX can allocate work to the front-facing service team members based on the above-mentioned factors and allows great traceability and monitoring of tasks. OPX offers a wide range of tools that can help you with your day-to-day operations. Often, managers or team leaders handle task allocation manually with the help of ticketing software. With OPX they can automate the planning process and ensure that tasks are assigned to the right people at the right time. This also frees up man-hours for your management, which can be used on critical tasks.

Smart work allocation is just one of the benefits of OPX. OPX has been proven to increase business efficiency and utilisation, and reduce operational costs, cycle times, and complaints while improving the quality of work and customer service. If you are looking to optimise your business processes and invest in the health of your business feel free to contact our team here.