Navin Benoy

Professional case study · 02

How to automate a regulated process without losing human judgement

A major Australian bank · Customer complaints

1 min read

$19M

A year in savings. Freed capacity was redeployed to customer service.

Where the automation sits

Complaint call
Speech-to-textAutomated
Sorted by typeAutomated
Sent to a specialist teamAutomated
Human reviewOn every complaint

Automation takes the admin. A person still reviews every complaint.

The situation

After a national inquiry into banking, complaint volumes outgrew the operating model. Every complaint has a regulated process and a deadline. The team handling them was stretched.

The real problem

Resolution times were the visible problem. Regulatory exposure was the real one. Adding people would ease the queue for a while but would not change how the work was done.

The decision

The programme set its order up front: regulatory exposure first, resolution time second, automation over headcount. Automation was the only option that kept working as volumes grew.

How to work it

  1. Find where the time goes.

    We mapped the process end to end and sat with the complaint handlers. Watching the work showed what the map missed.

    TIP

    Map the process, then sit with the people doing it. You need both.

  2. Automate in order of time saved.

    We ranked automations by time saved, because that is what automation returns. They included speech-to-text on complaint calls, sorting complaints by type, and sending each complaint to the right specialist team, such as cards, home lending or business lending.

  3. Keep a person on every decision.

    Human review stayed on every complaint. The model went through the bank's risk governance before it went live.

  4. Measure against the manual baseline.

    Each automation was compared with how long the same work took by hand. That is where the savings figure comes from.

  5. Run a weekly executive forum.

    Each week we reviewed which problems we were tracking, how each automation was performing, and where capacity could start moving to customer enquiries.

    TIP

    If no one decides where freed time goes, the savings stay on paper.

  6. Move the capacity, then hand over.

    The complaints team handled more calls, and some staff moved to the contact centres. The automation was built into the process before handover.

What changed

The programme delivered $19M a year in savings. Freed capacity was redeployed to customer service.

Use this when

  • A high-volume manual process sits under regulatory scrutiny.
  • You need people to trust automation: keep human review and a measured baseline until they do.