Bhavesh Vaghela: Hello and welcome to Ops Game Changers, the podcast that shines a light on the crucial role that operations teams have in driving business performance and improving staff and customer experience.
My name is Bhavesh, I’m the Chief Marketing Officer here at ActiveOps, and I’ll be your host. Now, in each episode. I hone in on one KPI, or a challenge that a business has solved. I delve into how they went about doing this and explore the outcomes achieved. Now, today we’re joined by Krystal Oliver, Regional Call Centre Manager at Rabobank Australia and New Zealand, to learn about how Rabobank has embarked on a simplification strategy. Krystal’s going to tell us about how they went about building a single source of truth across different work types and the call centres leading to a revised regional model that has driven up SLA’s while giving a career path to staff. Now, before we jump into the topic, let’s welcome Krystal to the podcast so Krystal welcome to Ops Game Changers.
Krystal Oliver: Thank you for having me. So yes, I’m Krystal, and I’m the regional call centre manager at Rabobank. My role is to provide call centre services to our clients across both Australia and New Zealand. I joined Rabobank about eight years ago. I was actually approached by a recruitment company looking for someone to fill a temporary role, and at the time it wasn’t what I was looking for, but I thought I would take a chance, and I haven’t looked back. So, in the eight years I’ve held about six roles and operations most currently leading the call centre team. And it’s been a really awesome, awesome opportunity for me.
Bhavesh: So, your journey through Ops was kind of like, I guess, you know it wasn’t planned right? You ended up in Ops, is that probably a fair statement?
Krystal: That’s the best way to put it. It wasn’t planned, and it worked out really well for me. I’m very pleased with my decision to join the bank.
Bhavesh: So, tell us a little bit more about, you know about Rabobank and your role within Rabobank.
Krystal: Sure. So, Rabobank is a food and agribusiness bank. So, one of the world’s largest rural lending banks. And we also offer an online savings platform for deposits as well, and those deposits are used to support the food and agribusiness sector. So, the regional call centre sits within operations and our team provide call centre services to our clients for our agribusiness clients, our online savings clients, and intermediaries as well across both Australia and New Zealand, and although we’re called a call centre, we actually juggle a pile of other tasks as well.
Bhavesh: I bet.
Krystal: The team are handling emails, secure messages, alerts, a number of reports, and we also do a handful of outbound calls as well.
Bhavesh: Fantastic. Now, you know, the topic at hand today is all about simplification, right? So, you know, most organisations, certainly most banks, are on some sort of a digitisation strategy, trying to simplify what they’re trying to do. So, you know, what does that mean for you and your role within the contact centre?
Krystal: So, we want it to be easy to do business with us. So that comes from a combination of moving a lot more digital. So, making things accessible for our clients online. But we are a relationship-based bank. So, it’s really important for us to still have a supportive operations team that is there for clients when they need them. But just like any other business, we’re trying to work more efficiently, have cost savings and basically support the business to grow without needing to continue to just grow our head count.
Bhavesh: Yeah. So, you know, when you’re thinking back. When you started this project few years ago in terms of the simplification strategy that you’re on. Tell us a little bit about the challenges that you were trying to overcome. What was the drivers behind the whole journey?
Krystal: Yeah, so Rabobank, Australia, New Zealand used to have 4 separate call centres. We had one in each country for online savings and one in each country for agribusiness. And the biggest challenge we found was that throughout the year each business line has different peak periods. So, the farming calendar in both countries is quite different. We have different end of financial years. And so what we’d find is, there’d be times of the year where one call centre was really at capacity and potentially needed extra staff when another call centre had a little bit more capacity that they could deliver. And across those 4 call centres we had different processes, different training. And we were kind of competing against each other for IT prioritisation. So, we would be looking at what was best for our call centre, but not necessarily recognising that another call centre might have something that’s actually much larger that should really be prioritised first. So, we were very disconnected and not necessarily working efficiently.
Bhavesh: And is that is that because they were all headed by different groups? Or was it just the nature of how it was at the time?
Krystal: I think it’s just the way that it was established initially. We had the agribusiness part of the bank, which is very specialised. Then we have the deposits model, and of course, because they had different processes. I think it was just natural at the time to set them up as separate call centres, and we didn’t necessarily work very regional many years ago we were very much working independently, as each country.
Bhavesh: Yeah, I mean, it’s I guess it’s a natural thing as organisations grow in terms of how the business operates and how it changes. So, you know clearly there was a need to simplify, and, I guess, simplify for point of view of the bank, but also from a point of view of providing a better service to your customer, and I think that’s probably, as you know, as important a driver.
Krystal: For sure, definitely during those peak periods throughout the year, service levels could definitely take a bit of a dip. And so the service wouldn’t necessarily be consistent all year round, which is what we want to deliver to our clients, especially during the stressful seasons of farming. We want to make sure that when they contact us it’s easy.
Bhavesh: So, talk us through, you know the, the, the start of the journey. So what? How did it come about, and what were the first steps in terms of the journey you went on?
Krystal: So I was very fortunate to be working alongside another leader, who I go along with great. We both had different strengths, and we identified that the two call centres in New Zealand were working very separately, and that we could leverage the skills of each team and the capacity. And so, we started just by cross-training a couple of people across the lines to see if it would work. We really got the ball rolling with that and long story short, we managed to put together the New Zealand call centre and we could then over time see what efficiencies we’d gained by doing that and really show the bank that working as one team was going to be really beneficial. New Zealand does have lower call volumes than Australian business lines. So the next step, also noting different regulatory requirements was to set up just a little pilot with Australian calls, and we did that with staff based in New Zealand, just a handful of them. And we went through training, got them on the lines and said, can we actually do this? Can we take Australia calls and New Zealand
and it was a huge success. We were able to lift the service levels. We were able to show that we could identify inefficiencies and the processes across the countries and we were really able to go back to the business and say, we can run this as one big team. And we’ve got the go ahead to proceed and set up the one regional call centre team that now services all of our clients.
Bhavesh: Fantastic. So, when you first were cross training, was that what was it like for the staff? Were they a little bit concerned, or were they excited about the prospect of doing different calls from different regions? What was the employee journey like.
Krystal: I think it was a little bit daunting at first. But it was a good opportunity for them, particularly those who’d been in the team for a few years. They kind of hit their capacity for the knowledge that they could learn on the one business line, and it meant that they could open their eyes to other areas of the bank. For example, if they took online savings calls, they’re just managing deposits, whereas when they start taking agribusiness calls they really opened up to lending and what’s going on in the farming world and different people in the bank. So, it was a really good engagement opportunity for them, and we were able to coach them through it slowly by just doing a few staff at a time and not making it one big bang.
Bhavesh: So, in terms of where you are today, how many, how many people are in the kind of blended call centre now?
Krystal: So, we have a head count of 49, which includes leaders and a few support staff as well. And those staff spread across three locations. So we have our hub, or our biggest team in Wellington, New Zealand. We have a smaller team in Hamilton, New Zealand, and we also have another small team in Perth in Western Australia.
And the reason we put a team there was Perth, unfortunately due to the different time zones often miss out on a full business day of service. So it was really important to us, as setting up this regional model that we could look at other ways we could deliver benefits to our clients. Not just efficiencies for us internally.
Bhavesh: Of course, and I guess the, you know the core principle of this is, people sitting in Perth could do calls for New Zealand in the same way, for people doing calls from New Zealand can do stuff for Australia, and it’s one team, regardless of where they’re based. And they’re managing the customer experience across all your customers in New Zealand and Australia is that’s fundamentally the principle, right?
Krystal: Correct. Yeah. So it’s really important for us to be operating as one team regardless of the location of the staff. And when you call us your call could flow into any of those locations. When we bring staff into the bank we look at the skill set that they have and pick one business line for them, and over time we will upskill them into other business lines. So definitely means that people in Perth could be handling New Zealand calls, and vice versa, which also creates some interesting conversations for us, as they hear different clients hear different accents.
Bhavesh: I bet. So what I’m curious about is how in practice that happens right? So you know, you’ve got to be able to identify in real time, I guess calls coming in, deciding on where the capacity is in each of the three kind of territories. So I would imagine. You know, data plays a big part in terms of planning the overall capacity that you have and where you utilise it. Just talk us a little bit about how you know the practicalities of how this actually works?
Krystal: I would describe it as a bit of a military operation.
Bhavesh: Okay.
Krystal: We do have really good data which helps us make good decisions.
So first of all, obviously call data. We have real time analytics of our calls coming in the patterns that we have throughout the day, so that we can build our roster out to ensure we have sufficient staff for the 14 hour business day that we service. We are then able to also use the call data that we have to identify, which business line has the next need for us to upscale staff into. But we do also take into account what career path they’re wanting to follow and what’s best for them but because we are not just a call centre, and we’re managing a whole pile of other tasks as well we do use ActiveOps to be able to see what capacity each location has and then we can shift around those tasks as required. So, just given the time zone differences there are certain tasks that have to be prioritised in the morning, so they might be done, either Wellington or Hamilton. And then there’s those that need to be done at the end of day, and we might put those in Perth. But we can easily say by overlapping the call data, the ActiveOps data we need to shuffle things around and where we might need to make changes.
Bhavesh: That’s really fascinating. So I guess what you’re saying is that, you know, cause it’s a blended call centre, as you described already. You’re not just doing calls. You’re doing inbound and outbound, but also processing tasks that are required. So you know, being able to use all your capacity across all of your three units into best way possible in order to deliver that overall service. So practically do you kind of merge the data sets together? Do you have dashboards? How do you kind of monitor this thing going on a day-to-day basis?
Krystal: So when we’re making a plan for the week ahead, we do plan per location, and then we roll it up until one big plan for the call centre again, because we want to operate as one team. The key point for us is as a regional call centre team is do we have capacity? And then with our call lines we are fortunate in that, because we have the real time data coming in, we can quickly make decisions to adjust what’s happening each day, you know, has there been some communication that’s gone out to clients that we need to make a new plan for tomorrow, move our rosters around. Our staff also work on a rotating roster to make sure we’ve got coverage and we just keep in touch would be the best way to put it. So we’ve got all the data in the world. But really good communication across all three locations means we’re all on the same page. We know what’s the priority. We know we need where we need to move staff, if we need to adjust staffs priority on the phones, and just come together collectively.
Bhavesh: And I think you know, one of the biggest strengths of any Ops team is to build flexibility and agility in the environment. So you can flex depending on what’s happening, the demands are across your customer base. So it seems like you’ve kind of really built a very strong, flexible unit that handles a whole set of different engaged tasks as well as calls for your customers, in order to deliver ultimately the best service to your customer at a I guess a cost implication as well, because, I would imagine, for the bank simplification is not just about simplifying from a point of view of the customer engagement, but also taking cost out of the business, I would imagine, is a big driver as well.
Krystal: For sure, I think the best example of that is those peak periods throughout the year. So, we haven’t increased our head count as such by merging the call centres together. But historically, during the different peak periods of the year, some call centres would need to take on additional temporary staff to be able to manage the needs of the clients. But now we’re in a very fortunate position where if we know, there’s a peak period coming up we can forecast how many calls we are expecting to get based on trends from previous years, make sure we’ve got sufficient staff cross-trained to be available, and we can move our staff around. So we’re not bringing on any extra staff to cover those periods which definitely has a huge cost saving to the bank.
Bhavesh: Yeah, of course, of course. And because you’re kind of using your capacity better. And you, you know what available capacity you have. So I’m curious to kind of talk through the employee side, right? Because this only works really well when you’ve got employees engaged and, you know, one of the biggest challenges of any contact centre is staff attrition, right in terms of people moving very quickly out of those organisations. What’s it been like for you guys? I would imagine that that’s changed because there is a career path. There is, you know, staff are doing multiple things. Is that fair? What’s it actually been like on the ground for you?
Krystal: I think, by creating opportunities for the team to progress. They develop new skills, but they also get those better insights into what’s going on in the rest of the bank, and so, if they were just working in one area, they’re probably a little bit narrow minded of what’s out there for them, but by exposing them to different business lines within the bank they can start to think about different career opportunities that they might have. So our attrition, I’m very proud of the biggest challenge we have, which is always bittersweet is we do lose a lot of stuff to internal roles. So we are constantly bringing in new stuff. But it’s really awesome to be able to see them take the skills they learn in the call centre and the relationships they built and the reputation they built for themselves, as well by providing really great service for our customers, and then taking that into other areas, developing their careers there, but also sharing some of that knowledge and insights that we gain in the call centre with other areas of the bank, too.
Bhavesh: Yeah, that’s really I guess. As you say, it’s probably a little bittersweet, right? Because you get through these individuals coming through the contact centre structure that you have the flexible contact centre structure. And then they’ve done so well that they move to other parts of the bank, which I guess is great for the bank, but it just, it’s a constant wheel for you, right in terms of training new individuals. But it seems like you’ve got to, you know, a pretty set down process that allows people to come in, be trained, be trained in multiple areas, and then, you know, continue to maintain the service levels.
Krystal: Yeah. And I think, that’s probably one of the reasons I love my team is
you get to bring in people quite often it’s the first corporate job teaching them all of the basic skills. You really see them develop both professionally and personally, and then you can see them go off into other roles. It does mean a lot of pressure on leaders to make sure that we’re supporting, people, have the right training plans in place and it’s a lot of effort. But the reward and the job satisfaction that you get out of that is definitely worth that.
Bhavesh: Exactly. And I and I would imagine also, it’s not about the job satisfaction for yourself seeing team members going into other parts of the business, but also the employees themselves who are doing these calls and doing these tasks. If they’re engaged, they’re going to provide a better service anyway to your customer. Right? I think that’s a kind of a I guess, not obvious statement but you know it’s amazing how many times you call contact centres, and you could see that they’re not very well engaged right in that sense. So if we, if we think about the kind of the results of all this, you’ve talked a little bit about the SLA’s from a customer experience point of view, you know, have increased. You’ve also talked about cost reductions. And you know you’ve talked about employees. So what sort of measures do you have across those three levels to demonstrate, I guess, to the rest of the business that this is continually delivering the value that you know you’ve created so far?
Krystal: So our primary measure that we share with the rest of the bank is our service level. So our speed to answer calls. Our service level for last year was 80 percent of calls in 20 seconds, and we hit that which was really important to us, because in previous years not all business lines would be hitting that target. And as I mentioned, we are a relationship based bank. So we want to encourage customers to be able to pick up the phone and contact us. We want it to be easy and they don’t have to wait. They’re busy. They’re out on the farm. They want to call us when they pop in for a cup of tea, and we’re there. So if we can keep those service levels high consistently throughout the year that keeps our stakeholders really happy. And in particular, for end of financial year. So that’s where we would always historically see a dip in the service levels. But since implementing the regional call centre, we were able to lift our service levels by 40 percent during that time. So that’s been really tremendous and something the team are really proud of as well.
Bhavesh: That’s fantastic, and the staff engagement, I mean. Do you have a do you have any kind of measures to see how your staff are engaging, or wellbeing, or anything of that nature?
Krystal: Yeah, so the bank does do engagement scans. Four times a year. And so those are really important to us. And when we get the results. We sit down as a team to review them and see what opportunities we have for improvement something that I do with my leadership team is, you know, you can easily be busy. Get busy being busy. And you just focus on the work. But what we focus on. And every single leadership catch up that we have is not only what training do we need to do? What do we need to focus on? It’s what activity do we have planned? And for the team? How are we going to do something engaging this week? And we have it just as high as a priority as hitting our SLA’s and having capable staff and we just go by the motto, Really that if you’re having fun in the office, and you have a smile on your face, when you pick up the phone, you sound so much better than if you weren’t. So as long as they’re professional on the phones they can have as much fun as they like in the background and it helps us deliver really awesome service to our clients.
Bhavesh: Oh, that’s fantastic! And do you get, I guess, you’re measuring the other side of it in terms of customer satisfaction as well. At the end of the engagement with the caller, or the work that you’re doing, I would, I would imagine this is also either sustained or improved.
Krystal: Yes, it has improved. So we do I think generally annually, that annual surveys for things like MPS, and we have a voice of the customer survey, and that feedback’s really great and being in a bank, it’s important that we record not only complaints or important regulatory measures that need to be recorded. But we prioritise making sure we record complements as well. So we can share those with the wider business to show. You know, these are the great things that customers are saying about us and they’re better to us just as much as any other piece of feedback that we might receive.
Bhavesh: No, that’s amazing. That’s amazing. So okay, that’s let’s take a kind of step back. You’ve gone through this process. You’ve gone through this simplifications strategy, you know, you started with the New Zealand call centres, and you expanded to that. You got the buy in internally and the results are there to be seen, right? It’s a fantastic story. Looking back, what would you do differently? If there’s any kind of things that you would, you know, go back to say, man, if we’ve done it in different way, then it would have got this quicker. Well, if you got any ideas, any thoughts around things that you would do different next time around?
Krystal: Yeah. So as part of our journey, we have been trying as much as possible to align the processes across all of the 4 call centres. It’s been a bigger task than we thought it would be, and we’re at the point where we are slowly still tackling them to this day. But what I probably would have done different is collate all of the things that we would love to change. Get our stakeholders in a room for a day and make some decisions all at once, so that when we roll this out to our staff it was less for them to learn in the beginning, and to make it easier for them rather than going through the process and continuously finding improvements. But I would say, on the other hand, that finding improvements in the processes and ways to align them has also meant we could really engage our staff because they can come to us and say, hey, we’ve identified. We do this slightly differently across countries. What are your thoughts on pushing this one forward as a change, so I would have loved to have done it differently but at the same time it has its benefits for team engagement as well.
Bhavesh: Yeah, I think that’s it’s a balancing act, isn’t it? Because you actually want, I would imagine, in the early days, the four contact centres you had. They were managing things inside different ways and the blended way of doing it probably is the most efficient, and everybody has a workaround and in terms of a process. So it’s how you build the workarounds into the process to make it as simple as possible, and sometimes going in and telling them is harder when it’s coming the other way. So I think it’s a very interesting observation, and the balance, I think, it’s probably it’s probably struck quite well for you guys. I would imagine.
Krystal: Yes, I think we’ve nailed it. Trying to be modest, but I think we’ve nailed it.
Bhavesh: That’s awesome. That’s awesome. And I think it’s a as I said, it’s a fantastic journey, because you guys started this off in New Zealand you had a view that you could do things better in your own initiatives drove that change. And did you have any trouble selling it back up to the chain, by the way, when you went and tried to explain this to your managers, and you know your COO and other in other parts of the bank, to give you the ability to do it across the whole of the region? What was that journey, like in terms of convincing people.
Krystal: We had amazing support from the likes of our COOs. They were fully on board the efficiencies that we could deliver. So that was really amazing. I think the hardest part probably for me personally, was earning the trust of other stakeholders.
So, in New Zealand I’ve built up that trust over many years, and my stakeholders trusted me to deliver call centre service. But when you’re going out to a wider range of stakeholders who haven’t necessarily seen you deliver things, building up that relationship with them, earning their trust and showing them what you can deliver, has definitely a bit been a bit of a journey for me to go on. But overall, I would say, we’re very well supported by the bank.
Bhavesh: That’s fantastic, and I assume you know that wider group of stakeholders that you have to encourage and engage at the end of day. They care about results. Right? So, they care about the numbers and what’s happening and what you’ve achieved. So as part of this whole process, I would imagine the data side has been as important as you know, the process side in order to be able to demonstrate value, and the and the journey are going on. So I think it’s a really interesting lesson there, because I mean, you know, when we talk to Ops leaders all over the world, the data side is always a massive challenge, because it’s coming out different systems. It’s, you know, excel spreadsheets and all that kind of stuff and trying to get to a point where it’s in real time, enabling you to make decisions in real time or even predicting the future. It makes a massive difference. And it looks like, you guys are, you know, probably well placed to adopt those kind of more future AI type of technologies as well.
Krystal: Definitely. So that’s a path that we’re actually going down at the moment. So we’re very fortunate to have good data sets that we can refer to make decisions in the call centre but the path that we’re heading down now is around speech analytics and using speech recognition to get even further insights to what our customers are calling about because we could have a metric.
Krystal: I called about a certain topic, but it doesn’t really drill down into the reasons they’re calling. If there’s any friction in the process and give us a whole lot more information that will be insightful to drive forward business cases and proposals to make things even better. So that’s a journey we are on at the moment, which is super exciting for the team.
Bhavesh: That is great, that’s great. And have you seen any early kind of observations from using some of the speech analytics that you could share?
Krystal: Early observations would be probably from my agent side. That a lot of them have different ways of explaining things which I’ve picked up. They’re all saying this exactly the same message but what comes out in the data that we can see is they all approach it slightly different, which is fine. We love personalised service but it will help us internally with our training and what the focus areas for those staff are but in terms of customer data coming back in, we’re probably not at a stage yet where we have something meaningful but hopefully by the end of this year.
Bhavesh: That’s super exciting. I think everybody’s on the on the AI journey right in terms of how they can improve. And we know when I think about AI I always think about it in three ways. You can either use AI from an Ops perspective. You can either use AI to improve your process right? So, to make more of the processes. Or you can use AI in order t to make the individual more productive. So can you imagine using things like the kind of co-pilot stuff from Microsoft just to make the individual more efficient and more productive. Or you think about how you improve, use AI to improve decision making, and I think it’s the decision making that becomes really interesting. Because if you think about every decision that you make has a degree, in most cases you need data to support that decision, and once you have data to support that decision, you have a degree of AI versus human, and that’s going to be a really interesting battle or journey for most Ops teams in the future is, how do they provide real time insights and predict future and prescribe actions based upon the data sets they have to improve decision making because improved decision making in theory improves a whole bunch of your business metrics, I would imagine.
Krystal: Yes, definitely. I think the biggest insight, not only from AI, but even just taking the time to speak to our staff to understand what they’re doing as well is, you know, a number on a spreadsheet is just a number and I think only tells half of the story, whereas if you can get those insights using AI and information from our staff as well, you can really put together a better idea of what the actual reason customers are calling us for, and what solutions might be the most appropriate, whereas if I just looked at that number on the paper, I could probably make an assumption. But is that really what our customers are wanting?
Bhavesh: Yeah. And that’s again, a very valid point. I mean, you know, data’s data, right? Doesn’t give you the context. And it’s the context that really matters. And I think that’s a really important message. As well to kind of, take away from this podcast so look a couple of questions for you around this. So, what’s your proudest moment, you know, looking back, what are you most proud of?
Krystal: That’s a tough question. I would say on a personal note.
Bhavesh: Okay.
Krystal: I am most proud of the professional and personal growth that I’ve been able to achieve during the Regional Call Centre journey, and there were a number of tasks that we had to tackle to get it across the line that I wouldn’t have dreamed of delivering at that stage of my career. So that was really a proud moment for me.
And then also just the service levels, really seeing the team come together, lifting the service levels, knowing that there’s a client at the end of that who is getting better service than they were before. That’s also a really awesome feeling to go home at the end of the day, knowing that you’re making things better.
Bhavesh: Yeah, I think you know in some ways that shows testimony to what it’s like working at Rabobank, I would imagine because, you know, there’s a lot of very skilful, hungry people within all organisations, but they need to be given the scope to be able to in in that change and drive transformation. And it feels like from your journey. And you are a true Ops Game Changer because you really drove that change with your team in New Zealand and across all of the regions. But you need support of people around you to give you that ability to do that, and it feels like that’s happened within Rabobank.
Krystal: Yes, we are very fortunate at Rabobank to have a very supportive culture. Always looking to innovate and change things, and particularly operations, we’re always looking at things with a continuous improvement mindset, and we’re
always given the opportunity to just come forward with an idea. And then there’ll be a leader there to support us along the journey. If it’s something that we can see benefit in. So, it’s definitely made my job more interesting and given me things to work on alongside managing the call centre so that I can develop myself and contribute to the wider bank as well.
Bhavesh: That’s great. That’s great. Sounds like a really fantastic success story. So, Krystal, I mean, what’s next? I mean, you mentioned speech analytics in the AI element. What’s next on this simplification strategy for you guys in there, in the role that you’re in, what’s the kind of roadmap look like?
Krystal: We are working through our roadmap at the moment, I think on the AI and speech analytics the other thing we’re working through is how we can use knowledge articles alongside the speech analytics to pre-populate items for the team to assist them on the calls. So, the idea of that is making sure we get the information right first time with a shorter call handling time. We’ll also be using AI to help us with our call notes, so for data record keeping, it’s really important that we keep a note at the end of each call of what was discussed. But of course that takes a bit of time after the call to do so we’ll be using AI to help us write those notes to keep a record of them in our system. And then using all the insights that we receive via existing feedback platforms and data sets and then the AI features that are coming. We really want to continue to drive forward business cases for digital enhancements. So additional self-serve functions, things that clients are asking for that. We have the insights to that we can share with the wider bank because what we really want to strive for is convenience for customers. They can do things online themselves. And then when they need us, we’re here to help them. We’re here to talk them through how to make a payment online if that’s what we need to do. But we’re more of a help function than them learning to depend on us at all.
Bhavesh: Yeah, it’s fantastic, fantastic. So, I mean, you know, if you’re I’ve got one final question for you, Krystal, if you don’t mind me asking. I have to ask you this one, which is the future. What do you think, from your perspective, you know you’ve been through this journey for the last six, seven years. What do you think the future of Ops looks like have you got a crystal ball in terms of what you think it’s gonna be?
Krystal: I wish I did. I think as we’ve touched on AI, I think that will become the new normal, I think. In the future that will be something that we heavily utilise and depend on. Alongside those digital enhancements and automation. And as I just kind of touched on in the last question there, I think a lot of operations will be automated and simple, and then we’ll still have the staff there to be able to support with exceptions, and when it’s needed. I think there’ll be less dependencies on staff to process things themselves which you know are prone to human error. If we can take that away that opportunity and really just be there for support rather than processing. That’s where I hope we go, at least.
Bhavesh: Well, Krystal, listen, thank you so much for taking the time to share this fantastic story. I think, as I said earlier on, it’s quite inspirational that you started small in New Zealand, and you drove this change, and you got the support at Rabobank in order to drive that so and I really want to appreciate, I think there’s so much that you’ve described today that would be great for other people going through this journey some great tips there in terms of what other people could do in terms of driving a simplification or supporting a bank simplification strategy because, you know, in every department has to support the corporate strategy and what you’re trying to achieve, and is a great example of that digitisation, simplification, strategy that you can leverage within operation. So, thank you so much for taking the time to share this with us.
Krystal: Thank you for having me.
Bhavesh: And thank you very much. Listeners for joining us. And please do check in to catch more episodes of Ops Game Changers, to hear more fascinating insights from other leaders in the field of operations about how they overcame challenges to drive productivity and boost performance at their enterprises. So, bye for now.
