Helping ABSA Bank unlock people experiences that matter
We recently worked with one of the top 5 banks in Africa to help them unlock the power of the ServiceNow platform across their People Experiences in the bank. They wanted us to discover how well their internal teams were using and adapting to their evolving people portal, how digital enablement and accountability could be improved and if individuals and teams could feel more empowered in the process.
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Industry:
Financial Services, Retail and Corporate Banking
Location:
South Africa, Pan-African
People:
45 000+ Employees
Business Challenge
Aligning expectations across multiple regions, multiple service offerings and multiple entry points into the Bank.
How we solved it
A practical set of design thinking workshops that used persona based thinking to ensure we understood the people journey the technology would support.
Technology Enablers
ServiceNow HR Service Delivery and Employee Centre for unified self service. Virtual Agent for elevated self services conversations.
Getting all your people on the same page
Process-centred challenges intersect with people-centred challenges, but they are not the same and usually require different approaches respectively.
We knew this project would require people-centred solutions, so a few of our design principles included partnering with users, taking their viewpoints and experience into consideration and focusing on data-informed reporting and insights to guide us in our exploration of solutions. We wanted to help the bank make its Employee Centre (People Portal built on the ServiceNow Platform) a single front door for end-to-end processes that integrated into other systems successfully. We named 10 design principles as actionable quick wins before we deep-dived and got into the nitty-gritty details.
Quintica helped us leverage our solid foundation on ServiceNow to create personalised people experiences in context of their job role, time of year and important life events.
Our Approach
Before we started on the ‘pains’ we began celebrating some of the ‘gains’ i.e., what was already working in the bank’s favour. There was a large amount, it just hadn’t been quantified:
- The bank has a foundational track record of utilising their Employee Centre successfully.
- Much of the optimisation possibilities found could start with strategy alignment and didn’t require expensive technology fixes.
- The Company’s steering team already displayed powerful and world-class engagement and openness to the process.
Focus on what's working
Focussing exclusively on the negative has been proven to undermine positive outcomes and from a people perspective can be bad for morale. We needed to mine the gold before we started pointing out the lead weighing things down.
Understanding who you are serving
As mentioned above, we use a customised blend of tools from our toolbox approaching a solution-finding mission. For example, with the bank we employed Design Thinking principles when we helped identify some of the Personas that brought the prevalent types of internal stakeholders to life. We needed to get an idea of who these people were to take their experiences and challenges as well as their potential into consideration and discover empathy-based solutions specifically for them. You need to know who a person is before you can really help them be at their best.
We then compared these Personas to what the leadership team’s strategy was surrounding the People Offerings.What did these parties need and want and how could these be aligned?