Written by: Dee Sommerville, Head of Commercial Banking Middle Office – JPMorgan Chase, and Anish Bhimani, Chief Information Officer, Commercial Banking – JPMorgan Chase
Though the client journey may begin with a phone call or meeting, long-term success is dependent on what happens after negotiations are complete and agreements are signed. Specifically, the true measure of success rests in how clients’ needs are handled once the sale is made and downstream implementation and service professionals get to work.
Throughout 2020, our Commercial Banking (CB) client onboarding team executed over 220,000 product implementations across multiple geographic, service and product level complexities. Aligning the right person to the right work at the right time was critical to providing an optimal experience for our clients—but until recently that work had been a relatively manual process.
Historically, our implementation managers relied on a series of labor-intensive, qualitative analyses of teamwide capacity and workload metrics to assign implementations. We knew there had to be a better way.
Last year, our CB Middle Office organization—comprised of teams across client implementation, service and experience—reimagined how to quantify incoming work requests and route them based on attributes such as team member availability, training, and existing client assignments. Shifting to an automated decisioning model would further streamline our operations and advance the overall client experience.
From Concept to Realization
Working together, our CB business analytics and technology teams designed, developed, and deployed The Assignment Assistant—an algorithm-powered portal that interprets, quantifies and recommends work allocations based on a multitude of factors and conditions.
- Using a statistical approach, we identified the key attributes of an assignment and how those factors impacted the way work had historically been allocated.
- By identifying the most complex attributes of a request, we were able to score and categorize each implementation.
- This data helped us better understand each assignment’s impact—including effort, duration, capacity and requests currently underway with the same client.
- We were able to create a holistic view of a team’s workload, enabling us to better field incoming requests and assign them based on resource experience and availability.
- In addition to streamlining end-to-end workflows, the output provided critical insights and metrics into a task’s relative complexity and requirements to deliver superior outcomes.
Feedback from managers who participated in the pilot was extremely positive, with one commenting, “The Assignment Assistant has put data at my fingertips. It’s helped me place the right work with the right resource, faster and more accurately than ever before. The result is a more precise deal assignment flow and a better client experience.”
These Three Were Key
- 1. We wouldn’t have reached this point without rethinking traditional boundaries and role expectations across functional groups and project teams. Crucial breakthroughs came from business analysts, technologists, data scientists, and operational managers. Innovation is every team member’s responsibility.
- 2. A strong data infrastructure was critical to our approach. Companies often have more data than they realize. The key is to harness the power of that data to provide insights into how to evolve your business and provide better client experiences.
- 3. Building with an iterative approach in mind was a priority. We designed the platform to enable continuous improvement and technology advancements over time.
Evolving with Our Clients
In 2021, we’ll migrate The Assignment Assistant to an enhanced, scalable in-house tool that accelerates our Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning gains. Building on this cloud-based platform will significantly reduce the time needed to make updates while enabling ongoing improvements through a self-learning algorithm. Complexity is ever-evolving in our business, and this solution will be there to ensure clients and colleagues benefit from the power of technology automation and insight.
We’re excited to support this year’s Windy City Summit, and we hope this sparks creative collaboration across your own teams.
