Between 2010 and 2011, 36 percent of customers around the world changed financial institutions because of service issues. Seven percent said they were planning to change banks for the same reason. These statistics from the Ernst and Young Global Retail Banking Consumer Survey 2011 underscore the importance of flawless customer service by an FI.

It's challenging enough trying to achieve perfect performance at the branch level. Add evolving and emerging channels — advanced ATMs and self-service kiosks, online banking and mobile banking apps — and the degree of difficulty increases exponentially.

Managed services are one resource an FI can tap for help to create a seamless customer experience and realize the cost efficiencies that are the promise of multi-channel services. A one-hour webinar hosted by ATM Marketplace, and sponsored by NCR, discussed how managed services can help an FI increase both cost efficiency and customer satisfaction.

The managed services value proposition

Tom Givens, director of managed services for NCR’s financial line of business, opened the webinar by explaining the benefits gained by the FI that opts for managed services.

"As financial institutions work to bridge digital and physical customer channels and continue to invest in new technologies that offer a seamless banking experience, they must consider availability and management costs as part of the total ROI," he said.

Financial institutions must ensure that all channels are always available when and where consumers need them, Givens said. As a measure of the importance of advanced incident management, he offered the example of an ATM located in a train station.

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The total availability of the machine might be 98 percent, which could seem pretty good, he said, unless outages were occurring during peak rush hours — and for reasons as simple as a lack of receipt paper. When a customer can't get a receipt after making an envelope-free check deposit, 98 percent availability seems far less acceptable.

"This is one of the most important things to bear in mind when it comes to measuring availability," Givens said. "You need to know, A, how many customers does an outage impact and, B, how they're going to be affected."

This is a situation in which managed services can help make a bank proactive rather than reactive, Givens said. And it falls into one of three categories that make up the value proposition of managed services:

Improved availability

• Targeted remote resolution gets the ATM operational as fast as possible
• Improved service intelligence delivers faster time to fix and improved first-visit fix
• End-to-end ownership of incidents drives improved availability

Improved ROI

• Reduced cost of operations compared to in-house service desk
• Improved interchange position driven by higher availability

Access to expertise

• Dedicated service desk staff receive ongoing training
• Redundant centers and infrastructure ensure continuity of operations
• Global best practices implemented and automated

A case study in cost efficiency

Sandra Dixon, EVP and group executive for operations at Extraco Banks offered a firsthand view of the benefits the $1.2 billion Waco, Texas-based FI reaped from managed services.

In 2009, the bank began rolling out automated deposit machines that it dubbed "Intelligent ATMs" to differentiate them from cash-only terminals. From the start, the machines were enormously popular with customers. But, Dixon said, "as we began to see transactions moving from the teller line to the ATM, we realized the performance expectation of these ATMs from our customers was going to be greater."

The bank identified a number of issues affecting ATM performance and availability:

• Service issues: not your old ATM
• Customers introducing media and causing increased downtime
• Messages from processor not definitive enough
• Reporting required to manage fleet and outliers
• Inadequate access to expertise

"Monitoring, identifying problems and resolving issues quickly is critical," Dixon said. "In the eyes of the customer, a depository ATM being down is the same as the branch being closed. They can’t drive to the next ATM down the street and make their deposit like [they can] withdrawing cash." Extraco's solution, she said, was Incident Management.

Turning this function over to a managed services expert allowed the bank to realize a number of efficiencies, Dixon said:

• ATM downtime was reduced.
• Thirteen percent of branch transactions migrated to ATMs.
• Extraco was able to reduce branch hours while expanding services 24/7.
• The bank gained the power to expand its footprint without adding bricks and mortar.

"The end result has produced the enhanced customer experience so important to Extraco," Dixon said. "The additional benefits help control costs during a very difficult economic period. [Incident Management] allows us to draw on expertise we could not develop internally to produce the performance results we are experiencing today."

The NCR-sponsored webinar, "Leveraging the Value of Managed Services to drive ROI at the ATM and Branch," is now available for on-demand viewing.