Creating an Incredible Employee Experience w/ OneUnited Bank | Simply Put

I feel like some days people, you know, expect my job to be as simple as just turning the lights on. It's always far more complicated than that. But I think it's important for my job to be for business leaders to feel like, you know, that's how easy it should be.

Make technology simple. Yes, Jim. I love it. What's up, y'?

All?

I'm Emmanuel Acho, host of Simply Put, the show that takes complicated business challenges and breaks them down in a simple terms everyone can understand. In other words, you won't hear manual data lookup. Cause here we'll say simply put, automade. Okay, you just met Jim Sloca, the chief information officer at One United Bank. Jim is going to give us the lowdown on customer service from a tech perspective because we always got to hear from tech. Right. You'll also hear from Nicole Granucci, all around Salesforce service cloud expert who will help us understand the ins and outs of customer service. We good? Cool. Let's get back to it. Jim.

I'm Jim Slocum. I'm the chief information officer here. One United. We've been a Salesforce customer now since probably 06. I think one of the first things we rolled out was service cloud. It's been important to us, especially over the course of the past year because we've gone through this period of immense growth of new customers. Service cloud has given us the information about those customers and where they are in their journey. Probably the most successful place where we've automated leveraging the Salesforce platform was in our online account opening. We really have been very effective at leveraging Salesforce's low code or no code code environment to automate workflows across many departments in the organization. The power of service cloud gave us that opportunity to meet the customer need as it was coming in with a new set of employees that were able to be easily trained. Most of the time, people try and hire employees and bring them into a bank and then they sit them in front of these really arcane old systems. One of the real benefits we have is that the service cloud platform is a modern user interface that employees actually enjoy using. Some of the things that I think for us last year during the pandemic that were particularly challenging was the fact that we were growing at the same time. We had the visibility as managers to be able to see what was happening and respond. What we were able to do because of service cloud is we were able to roll up the singular view of the customer into Salesforce so that when our agents get on the phone with our customers. They have that full view into who their customer is so that they can quickly and easily solve that customer's need. We've been implementing and leveraging Service Cloud for so many years now that we're in a position to be able to field all those support channels in a singular place and have that full 360 degree view of our customer in which we can respond in context and in the channel that they want to be met at.

Ah, that coveted 360 degree view of each customer. It's what every customer service department wants and we all want more innovation. So let's look at the top three tips from Jim's 1. United Story Invest in Efficiency these days, automation everywhere is essential in customer service. Jim can customize his automation process for cases such as assignment and escalation rules. He can define and set up auto responses to eliminate manual tasks, and he can empower his agents to work from anywhere. In return, he'll see a boost in agent productivity, an increase in customer satisfaction, and returning customers who love One United Bank. Plus, Jim's operations efficiency will go up. What goes down? Costs. Meaning that Jim's customer service center will go from a cost center to a profit center. And what about reaching customers wherever they are?

That's a very important thing as a digital bank to be able to meet your customer where they want to engage with you.

Well said. And so is empowering employees near and far. That's our second tip. Engage and work anywhere. In this remote work world, teams are turning to collaboration tools like Slack to tackle any challenge in real time, even from miles apart. Use these platforms to move fast without long email threads and extra meetings. This all works even better with a single source of truth where agents can view data from every department on one screen. Wherever you go, success will follow. Just sit back and enjoy an interface that employees actually enjoy. That's what an IT manager loves to hear. And there's our third tip. Choose a UI you love. Give agents an interface that's familiar and intuitive. Try looking for service tools with a point and click layout that eliminates manual tedium and makes everything easier. Managing workflows, creating and updating records, and logging calls. Now your staff can spend less time searching for information and more time actually helping customers.

Been here with the bank now for the better part of two decades. I'd say to go through the period of time where we've transitioned from being that brick and mortar institution to being now the first and only black owned digital bank in the country. It's been really exciting and knowing that the work that we're doing here is making a difference on a national basis is the kind of thing that I think everyone goes to work wanting to do with their day. My name is Jim Slocum, and you're watching. Simply put.

Huge thanks to Jim and Nicole for giving us a bird's eye view of how One United is servicing its customers and how they're using technology like service cloud to connect its employees across different channels. Up next, we'll talk to someone who plays a crucial role in changing the retail landscape for banks. Trust me, you do not want to miss that. So click on through to the next video and we'll see you soon.