Literacy analysis part of continuous improvement at ASB

In this case study ASB Bank Chief Human Resources Officer, John Barclay, reflects on what the company learned from a formal assessment of the literacy needs of 400 call centre employees.

"We have learnt so much from taking time with the needs analysis. We know more about what our customers and people need. We know much more about the kind of programme we’d like to develop."

• Overview
• Assessing our needs
• Implementing a response
• Measuring the outcome
• Improving for the future
• Top tips
• Hear from ASB Bank
• Any questions?

Overview

Who is ASB Bank?

ASB Bank (ASB) is one of the country’s leading banks, with more than 135 branches serving a million customers nationwide.

Founded more than 160 years ago, ASB has developed a culture of continuous improvement. It was one of the first banks in New Zealand to offer weekend banking and internet banking and has an overall goal of being ‘world class for our customers, colleagues and communities'.

It’s been rated number one in overall customer service for retail banking several times by the University of Auckland Business School Retail Banking Customer Survey.

What did they expect to gain?

In 2009 the bank decided to carry out a workplace literacy needs analysis to find out if training would help improve the customer service skills of its Auckland-based contact centre employees.

What were their key outcomes?

Data showed a definite need for training among the bank’s 400 contact centre staff and, yes, workplace literacy and numeracy training would make a positive difference within the organisation.

The bank also found it would be possible to integrate literacy training into an existing recruitment, training and performance support infrastructure - and improve the infrastructure at the same time.

Assessing our needs

Starting out

We knew many of our contact centre people needed help with reading, writing, maths and oral communication starting out.

But we weren’t sure how workplace literacy training would help solve the issue – we wanted to take a bit of time to gather information.

Improving the bottom line

Like most big corporates, communication is the bread and butter of our business. We communicate with our customers, suppliers and colleagues every day by phone and email.

We recognise that top quality customer service from employees who communicate well and exceed the expectations of our customers will give us the competitive edge.

To satisfy our customers and keep them loyal, we have to get the basics right each and every time one of our people has contact with a customer.

We know the quality of our communication, our oral communication skills particularly, has a major impact on how easy it is to do business with us.

We also knew from client feedback that poor communication – both oral and written – was turning them off. We needed to improve things. That’s when we started to look at workplace literacy training for some of the answers.

Implementing a response

Getting help

We were a bit reluctant to involve an external provider. Not because we doubted their skills and expertise. We felt reluctant because they wouldn’t know our business like we do.

We needn’t have been worried. Sadler and Associates (Sadler), our provider, fitted in extremely well with our business and quickly came to see what was most important to us - a service culture and a strong commitment to our customers.

They were willing to look at different ways to think about and fund training and take on board our existing training infrastructure.

They also made sure the needs analysis itself reflected how our people interact with customers and one another by phone, email and face-to-face.

The needs analysis results surprised us.

Results showed large gaps in our numeracy skills overall and in our recruitment process (which is supposed to pick up those things). In fact, we found a wide range of internal processes and procedures that were either lacking, inconsistent or missing altogether.

It picked up issues with language.

Sometimes strong accents or hesitant speech were getting in the way of being understood. At other times our people weren’t using plain enough language.

These things are easily resolved with a bit of support. But you need to know they exist and to what extent before you can solve them.

The needs analysis made it clear we needed workplace literacy training. And it helped us become clear about several key issues to do with programme development that have been really useful.

It helped us see we don’t want an add-on programme provided by an outside organisation for individual employees.

Instead, we want training to become part of the way we do things here at ASB. We want it to become part of our overall emphasis on continuous improvement. We want reading, writing, maths and communication learning incorporated into our existing training programmes to make the programmes better and more effective.

Making it work

Right now we’re at the early stages of reviewing our training, which, again, involves answering a number of key questions.

For example, we’re asking: How do we structure training so individual needs are met? How do we justify the cost of training employees who work just 4 hours a week?

How do we secure management support for training by keeping them up-to-date and showing them value? How do we measure success or determine if an employee needs more support? Who should we get to provide training? How do we fund it long term?

Developing a training model

Looking ahead, the training model we’d like to see in our contact centre will feature two key steps.

The first will involve assessing employees as they are recruited, move roles or become promoted. The second will involve making sure they get the literacy training they need.

Ideally, we want to build up the literacy skills of our employees from day one.

We're also interested in making sure we get better at recruiting people with the right skills into the right roles.

It's likely we won’t have the content and materials to start with, but, we now know where to source training expertise.

Measuring the outcome

Reflecting on the data

We have learnt so much from taking time with the needs analysis and taking a somewhat cautious approach.

We know more about what our customers and our people need and we know much more about the kind of programme we’d like to develop.

We’ve also looked at how we might measure the impact of workplace literacy training.

I’d like to see us use tools such as customer engagement surveys before and after training, for example. I’d like to see a clear correlation between improved customer service and improved customer engagement.

Improving for the future

Embedding change

We need our contact centre employees to be great communicators and we can help them achieve that by giving them the training and support they need.

But there is more to it than that. As people find their jobs easier, they become more engaged, more focused on what they are doing and the quality of what they do improves. They are also more likely to stay with us, so we end up increasing productivity and retention.

Making it sustainable

This whole journey has again emphasised the importance of using what we’ve got to better effect and always looking for opportunities for continuous improvement.

Taking stock

I’d say we’ve gained a deeper understanding of how to improve the quality of service we provide to our customers by looking at things from a completely new perspective – and that’s been great.

We’ve learned a lot, yet we haven’t had to spend vast amounts of money. There’s an important lesson for us all in that.

Top tips

1. Don’t rush into rolling out a workplace literacy training programme. Instead, take time to understand your issues and how to address them.
2. Look at developing and providing a literacy programme internally. Employing an external training provider isn’t the only answer.
3. Seek the opportunity to improve and adapt an existing training programme.
4. Consider making literacy training part of everyone’s professional development.
5. Find a training provider who shares your beliefs about working with and improving what you’ve got.

Hear from ASB Bank

John Barclay talks about:

• why workplace literacy is a real issue in New Zealand
• how limited literacy skills affect customer relations.

Any questions?

If you have a question about this case study, please send us an email.