HSBC Bank Strives to Improve Customer Service Quality

Case Type: operations strategy; organizational behavior.
Consulting Firm: KPMG Consulting first round job interview.
Industry Coverage: banking; financial services.

Case Interview Question #00331: Suppose you are working for the internal Strategic Group of HSBC Holdings plc (LSE: HSBA, NYSE: HBC), a global banking and financial services company headquartered in Canary Wharf, London, United Kingdom. The bank has around 7,500 offices in 87 countries and territories across Africa, Asia, Europe, North America and South America and around 100 million customers. As of June 2010, it had total assets of $2.418 trillion.

Recently, HSBC Bank is facing a increasing number of problems with the quality of its customer service. Its customers are complaining about long waits on the phone, being transferred to multiple branches, separate accounts requiring multiple calls, etc. The customer service function is currently performed at each individual branch. The questions to you: How can HSBC Bank’s customer service be improved? What strategic plan would you recommend?

Possible Solution:

This strategy case question is rather open ended. No standard framework can be easily applied into the case. The following is only one of many possible ways to approach this case.

1. Start with diagnosis of the current customer service operations:

• How is each call handled at customer service center?
• What do customers complain about?
• Why did this mistake happen?
• Are there enough customer service representatives?

2. Do benchmark analysis across the different branches within the entire HSBC Bank:

• Do all the branches see the same ammount of complaints?
• Are there any branches that are doing better than others?
• What are the best pratices?

3. Do the same analysis but benchmarking against other competing banks:

• Do competing banks experience similar situations?
• How do they handle their customer service?

4. Benchmark against other industries, which are conducting similar customer service operations, for example, telecommunications industry.