Customer Service Improvement Project at Qatar National Bank Evaluation

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Table of Contents

Introduction
Evaluation of the Project Using the 4-Stage Model
Conclusions
References

Introduction

Qatar National Bank is one of the oldest Qatari banks and a central piece to the Qatari banking system. With over 7 billion dollars in operating income, it is one of the largest and most influential financial institutions in the Middle East, with its offices present in 31 countries (Kamrava 2017). The company is governed using a top-down operational structure for most projects, with initiatives rising from the top and then passed on through individual layers of authority and command, all the way down to the ground-level personnel (Kamrava 2017).

Recently, the bank sought to implement a customer satisfaction program that would give the company knowledge about what do the customers perceive as strengths and weaknesses of the provided services and help adjust accordingly. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the proposed project in accordance to the overall business strategy, market requirements, operational experience, and capability of development of its own resources and processes.

Evaluation of the Project Using the 4-Stage Model

The project launched by Qatar National Bank involves the collection of feedback about recent banking operations and employee performance through various means of engagement, including personal requests for feedback at the office, e-mails, phone calls, and SMS messages to banking customers. They are requested to evaluate the performance of the system they have been using, the performance of the employee servicing them (if available), and any potential complaints and recommendations they might have. The project lasted for 3 months, during which customer feedback was collected.

It was later analyzed using quantitative (for scores) and qualitative means (for text and verbal feedback), to implement changes throughout the Qatar National Banking system. The changes involved installing ATMs and self-service machines in greater numbers near all banks as well as selected public locations, removing telephone bots in favor of human operators, and simplifying the customer journey experience by reducing the number of steps needed to be taken before the transaction is completed.

The project will be evaluated using the 4-Stage model. Hayes and Wheelwright’s 4-Stage model is a conceptual tool meant to evaluate the project with the extent of how its operational contributions improve the company’s competitiveness (Slack and Brandon-Jones 2018). Its four steps are as follows (Slack and Brandon-Jones 2018):

Step 1: Relationship with internal and external customers. It reflects on the way operations relate with external customers and how it manages the relationships with internal users.
Step 2: Understanding of operations practice. Reflects on how well the organization understands and knows its own operational practices.
Step 3: Links with competitive strategy. Reveals the way resources are being used in relation to the company’s competitive strategy.
Step 4: Innovation within the operation. Shows how the practices are improved as a result of the operation’s function.

These steps have four stages of evaluation, with 1 being a very rudimentary and insufficient level of operational efficiency and 4 being the achievement of maximum potential within the chosen framework of operation. The operations within Qatar national bank will be evaluated using this tool.

In terms of relationships with internal and external customers, the existing stage of satisfaction was at level 2. The bank rarely, if ever, let its customers down, but the transactions between itself and the customers were rarely a pleasant matter. Customers reported a lack of connection between themselves, the employees, and the bank in general (Iberahim et al. 2016). The operation was focused on processing as many customers as possible without forming meaningful connections to them, which caused a loss of certain customers. After the feedback and improvements, external customers were left more satisfied than before. Internal customers, however, which included suppliers and employees, were not in the scope of this operational improvement, which prevents giving it a stage 4.

The second step is the understanding of the operational practice. Before the intervention was carried out, Qatar National Bank was at the second stage of operational understanding. It knew its own processes well enough, but the last customer survey like this one was carried out roughly 5 years ago, meaning that any data it collected was, at this point, outdated and obsolete (Chen et al. 2019). The standards of practice changed much during these 5 years; the levels of competition grew.

What was innovative back then was common practice today. The information provided during the survey would help improve operational efficiency and boost the bank’s competitive levels by catering to the customer-centered strategy now put in place (Chen et al. 2019). After the improvements were made, the understanding of operational practice grew to stage 3. To achieve stage 4, an independent review of existing practices from a professional expert company would be required, to help identify any weaknesses and inefficiencies, which would need to be replaced in accordance with Six Sigma, TQM, and other quality frameworks (Saxena and Rao 2019).

The third step links the operation to the company’s competitive strategy. As of last year, Qatar National Bank made an emphasis to move from a company-centered strategy to a customer-centered one. It suggests placing the customer’s needs and desires before the company’s intent to acquire as many profits as possible (Iberahim et al. 2016). The idea was that the increase in customer appreciation of the bank and its products would help increase the competitive advantage and allow gaining additional market share at the expense of other banks still following the old company-centered doctrine (Richter et al. 2018).

The innovation reviewed in the scope of this paper is well in line with the chosen strategy of increasing competitive advantage. By learning what customers perceive as strengths and weaknesses, and by capitalizing on the data received from them, Qatar National Bank managed to streamline and lean out their customer journey and improve the personalization of customer-bank communication, particularly over the phone. It did not go into the 4^th stage, however, since maximization of competitive advantage would have also meant an internal reflection on one’s systems and operations, which could not be possible on customer feedback alone.

Finally, there is the innovative aspect of the operation. One could argue that the very purpose of the customer survey was to provide qualitative and quantitative data to base the innovation on (Richter et al. 2018). By using customer feedback, the bank was capable of improving its services in a way that satisfied the customers. Some inefficiencies (from the customer perspective) were located and successfully dealt with. There is still room for innovation, however, as the intervention addressed only the customer side of things while failing to take into account the employees’ and operational managers’ points of view. Since they have practical insights on how day-to-day management is handled, they could offer constructive ideas for innovation. As it stands, the bank managed to shift from Stage 2 to Stage 3 in innovation.

Based on the 4-stage review of four parameters of operational efficiency, the intervention had moderate success on all of them. It managed to achieve improvements on all counts, but much remained to be worked on. The operational strategy, though being top-down, resulted in bottom-up actions, with feedback received at the bottom and implemented through all parts of the command chain.

The strategy aligned with market requirements, as the existing processes at the Qatar National Bank, were built on old expectations of what customers require from efficient banking. The learning experience from its operation was marginal, as the intervention relied largely on customer feedback rather than on employee and junior manager response. Finally, the strategy managed to develop the capabilities of its existing resources and processes, which was demonstrated in the transfers from stages 2 to 3 across all key points.

Nevertheless, the innovative and feedback-gathering operation could have been improved in several critical ways. First, feedback from managers and employees should also have been gathered (Alolayyan et al. 2018). It would have allowed the bank to see both sides of the argument over the same issue and understand whether the operational issues were caused by employee negligence or the existing errors in processes being used to service customers.

In addition, a third-party expert company could have been invited to provide an objective and unbiased analysis of the system, along with a set of recommendations based on their experience with Qatar National Bank as well as other similar organizations and facilities (Alolayyan et al. 2018). These measures would have helped push the existing operational capabilities beyond effectively serving the existing strategy to exceeding the expectations of customers, employees, and shareholders alike (Alolayyan et al. 2018).

Conclusions

Qatar National Bank is one of the largest financial institutions in Qatar and the Middle East. Multinational financial giants typically have a hard time innovating and improving their operations due to the sheer scope of the endeavor. The reviewed operational project sought to gather customer feedback on existing operations and develop improvements based on the quantitative and qualitative data received from such.

The solutions developed as a result of this project included improving the customer-employee relations by removing the call-bot, which only took time and annoyed the callers, reducing the number of steps taken in the customer’s journey, and improving the overall quality of service by allowing customers to self-service rather than go to the office for it. These measures helped improve the overall operational score from 2 to 3 on the Hayes and Wheelwright scale. Further improvements could be made by gathering feedback from employees and making them an active part of the decision-making process. However, in the scope of the existing top-down management framework, that might not be entirely possible.

References

Alolayyan, M. N., Al-Hawary, S. I. S., Mohammad, A. A. S., & Al-Nady, B. A. H. A. (2018) ‘Banking service quality provided by commercial banks and customer satisfaction. A structural equation modeling approaches’. International Journal of Productivity and Quality Management, 24(4), pp. 543-565.

Chen, S., Nazir, M. I., Hashmi, S. H., & Shaikh, R. (2019) ‘Bank competition, foreign bank entry, and risk-taking behavior: cross country evidence’. Journal of Risk and Financial Management, 12(3), pp. 106-116.

Iberahim, H., Taufik, N. M., Adzmir, A. M., & Saharuddin, H. (2016) ‘Customer satisfaction on reliability and responsiveness of self-service technology for retail banking services’. Procedia Economics and Finance, 37, pp. 13-20.

Kamrava, M. (2017) ‘State-business relations and clientelism in Qatar’. Journal of Arabian Studies, 7(1), pp. 1-27.

Richter, N., Jackson, P. and Schildhauer, T. (2018) Entrepreneurial Innovation and Leadership: Preparing for a Digital Future. New York: Springer.

Saxena, M. M., & Rao, K. S. (2019). TQM, Six Sigma and Lean. International Journal of Applied Engineering Research, 14(15), 3442-3447.

Slack, N. and Brandon-Jones, A. (2018) Operations and process management: principles and practice for strategic impact. New York: Pearson.

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Customer Service Improvement Project at Qatar National Bank Evaluation

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