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Building a business application to support front-office and back-office staff in Santander bank

At Eximee, we know banks need to ensure a good Employee Experience to provide efficient customer service. Therefore, we have developed a framework to create business applications that bank employees need. In this success story, we describe how we streamlined Santander Bank's employees' work with an application developed using the Eximee platform.

Santander Bank
a difficult and lengthy process of negotiating mortgage terms and poor employee experience
to orchestrate the team's work across all channels and reduce negotiation time

Project background

Challenge – workflow orchestration

Servicing customers with mortgages at Santander Bank involves a complex process, spanning multiple channels such as call centers, electronic banking, and branches. Therefore, it required consistency and various improvements for the bank's employees.

Objective – to facilitate the team's work and, as a result, improve the customer experience

To facilitate the team's work and, as a result, improve the customer experience. Our task was to shorten the time spent negotiating mortgage terms. This, in turn, was to enable flexible scaling of the team handling the process and eliminate errors resulting from employee overload while serving customers in different channels.
The orchestration of employees' activities in different channels significantly increased customer satisfaction.

Preparing to work on an application for bank employees

As usual, we started with gathering requirements and mapping needs. We developed a blueprint of the process (in Camunda) and the employees' roles (in Keycloak). It allowed us to clearly define what features were required in the MVP version and what should be delivered later.

How did we work on Santander's front-office and back-office application?

We developed the applications iteratively. The increments depended on the client's needs and testing results. This way, the bank had a functioning process from the beginning, and successive elements were added gradually without having to shut down the whole process. Also, the iterative increments facilitated the introduction of subsequent people into the project.

When configuring the Eximee Dashboard, we took into account how each group of employees would use it, which views they would need and which they would not. After launching the tool, we gathered their feedback and implemented the findings.

Work on the Eximee Dashboard project took several months. Each project phase was led by a person with critical competencies for that particular stage.

What does the Eximee Dashboard at Santander Bank look like?

The most important elements included in the application for bank employees are:

Task list

The task list displays tasks resulting from the steps defined in the process. They are assigned to a particular group of employees (determined by role in Keycloak).

An employee can see their assigned tasks or tasks not assigned to any employee. In addition, people with a higher level of authorization, such as team managers, can see all tasks regardless of whether and to whom they are assigned.

Case list

The case list displays all process instances – ongoing and completed. It allows an employee to see, for example, all cases of a particular customer or all customers with the same case type.

The case list can include the cases at the stage of automated tasks and cases where an error has occurred, e.g., a service call error. An employee can invoke the same service again, thus resuming the process without contacting support.

Different views depending on the authorization level

The forms can be displayed in different ways, e.g., for a call center employee and a branch employee, there may be different views. Completing the form is one and the same step in the process and has the same effect, regardless of the channel in which it is completed.

Different form views for the same step in the process:

The last screen is a form submitted at a branch.

The form submitted at a branch:

Other enhancements for bank employee experience

The Eximee Dashboard contains customer cards with personalized offers, functioning like a CRM. On the one hand, an employee gets hints about the offer they can make to a customer (screen at the top), and on the other hand, they can take notes on a particular customer and case (screen below), for example.

The form on a customer's card allows a consultant to quickly access information such as the margin range they should operate within when negotiating loan terms with the customer. This way, they know if they can offer a discount and how it would affect the customer's installments. We designed the form to facilitate the talks with a customer and record the negotiation outcome in the system. Once the mortgage conditions are approved, the process continues automatically.

Bank employees got the ability to resolve incidents without any help from administrators or the platform provider. They can renew a step in the process which, for some reason, got looped and prevented the customer from going further.

If re-calling a service doesn't help, an employee can check what stage the case is at and whether there is an incident. They ask administrators or the provider to solve the problem only after exhausting these possibilities.

 

How does the application benefit Santander Bank?

Automation of customer contact

Thanks to the Eximee Dashboard, bank employees have gained access to the calendar and support in making appointments. They can send customers email notifications or codes to decrypt documents using an SMS.

Streamlined manual steps

Process steps visualized on screens in the Eximee Dashboard are the steps that could not be automated or robotized due to their nature or legal requirements. If not for the solutions developed with Eximee, bank employees would have to perform these tasks manually, using spreadsheets, for example.

Easy process maintenance with Camunda

With Camunda, the bank can efficiently map out the processes, incrementally build, automate, and maintain them at scale.

Frictionless case processing and great bank employee experience

  1. Tracking the status of cases, regardless of the channel
  2. Storing all case information and client documents in one place
  3. Task management, e.g., adding notes on cases
  4. Recording new personalized credit terms on a customer's card used during the negotiations
  5. Quick and flexible scaling of the customer service team (e.g., at a time of increased demand for a particular banking product)
  6. Automation of cyclic delivery of documents to external institutions

Solutions used in this project

  • Process automation
  • Digital transformation
  • Employee experience

Authors

Eximee Team