Business process re‐engineering at the Co‐operative Bank improving personal customer service

The Co‐operative Bank strategy of encouraging its customers to telephone or write to its account management centre, rather than the branches, proved successful. Volumes grew rapidly, placing pressure on service quality resulting in lost telephone calls, correspondence backlogs and duplication of effort as work was handed off to other areas. A project team was formed to re‐engineer fundamentally business processes and to realign the organization, leading to improvement in customer service. AMC employs some 600 staff, in an operation accessible by telephone 24 hours a day 365 days per year. It receives over 4 million calls and processes over 5 million pieces of paper a year. The project commenced in 1993, looking at business processes and concluded in May 1994 when the last of 34 multiskilled customer‐service teams pulled out. Recent MORI research found that among high street banks Co‐operative Bank had the highest customer satisfaction rating scoring 94 per cent among its customers.