Secure Banking through Excellent Service

The transition of the TAN procedure poses various challenges for banks – especially for customer service. Thousands of additional customer inquiries must be answered within a few weeks. Professionally, without long waiting times, error-free, and above all with a satisfied customer at the end of the conversation.

Without a properly set up TAN procedure, online banking does not work. The process is therefore highly critical for the customer. Errors during the transition can immediately negatively affect customer satisfaction.

Looking for a banking-experienced partner

A Swiss cantonal bank wanted to switch its TAN procedure from M-TAN to Push and Photo-TAN. Since the transition was to take place within a few months, the bank expected a high volume of calls. These were from customers who needed support or had questions about the new TAN procedures. It was foreseeable that the expected call volumes could not be handled by the in-house service team alone without burdening customers with long waiting times.

To minimize such risks, the cantonal bank sought a banking-experienced partner in the area of customer care. This partner was to support the internal service teams with additional resources during the transition. Within an overflow scenario, large volumes of customer inquiries were to be handled professionally and conclusively.

The cantonal bank commissioned TELAG with customer support. As one of the largest customer experience service providers in Switzerland, TELAG brought, in addition to decades of experience in the banking sector, the manpower and flexibility required for the project scope.

Customer support at the highest level by TELAG

Thanks to its size and proven recruitment processes, TELAG was able to assemble a 30 FTE-strong service team in Zurich within four weeks. All employees in this team already had broad experience in banking and finance. Together with the cantonal bank, a comprehensive training concept was developed. As part of this training concept, the employees were trained on the complex topic of the two new TAN procedures and the associated processes and questions.

A particular challenge was that the cantonal bank offers its customers both Push and Photo-TAN as future options, which significantly increased the training effort.

Higher call volume than expected

The support started in July 2022 with the care of early switchers. In this phase, initial learnings and optimization possibilities were identified, which were quickly adapted by the project team and colleagues at the hotline. The peak phase was then reached in September. This posed the challenge that 80% more calls were received than originally expected by the cantonal bank.

TELAG managed to quickly build up additional staff. This allowed bottlenecks and long waiting times to be quickly reduced.

Another small challenge arose towards the end of the project period when significantly longer than expected high call volumes were received. Here too, TELAG was able to react flexibly and keep employees, who were actually planned for other projects after the projected end of the project, longer in the project.

This ensured that the customer received service at the highest level with low waiting times even in the ramp-down phase of the project.

Good performance metrics

Despite a significantly higher call volume, TELAG achieved extremely good performance metrics and very high customer satisfaction. The average accessibility over the entire project period was 93%, meaning only 7% of calls were not answered. In 99% of calls, the customer was helped conclusively. Although the call volume during the peak phase of the project was almost 80% higher than expected, the average waiting time in the entire project was under 30 seconds for 68% of calls.

High satisfaction with the implementation

As one of the largest customer experience service providers in Switzerland, TELAG brought, in addition to decades of experience in the banking sector, the manpower and flexibility required for the project scope.

After project completion, the cantonal bank expressed high satisfaction with the implementation by TELAG. The transparency in reporting and the speed and flexibility in adapting to project needs were also explicitly praised.