Microsoft Enterprise Mobility
Sterling Bank improves collaboration and creates a modern work experience for employees
Sterling Bank with a mission to touch every heart, buoyed by a deeply wired Service and laser-focused One-Customer culture, embarked on a transformative journey to revolutionize its operations and enhance employee and customer experiences. Partnering with Wragby, Sterling bank successfully adopted a suite of cutting-edge Microsoft tools to foster a modern, collaborative work environment.
This was not just a leap towards digitalization but a commitment to optimizing business processes, empowering employees, and ensuring secure, rapid information sharing. As a result, Sterling Bank witnessed significant improvements in communication, collaboration, and operational efficiency, positioning itself as a frontrunner in the competitive banking sector.
As a full-service national commercial bank, Sterling bank serves over 3 million customers through its network of more than 179 branches, 6,000+ ATMs and Point of Sale Devices, and more than 4,500 workers. One of the Four Pillars of Sterling Bank’s strategy is to “Optimize operations and technology to drive better control, manage costs, complexity, and risk.”
The Business Challenge
Banks play crucial roles in the economy: supporting businesses, originating credit, creating employment, financing dreams, and driving economic growth. Challenged by the operating environment, the banking sector in Nigeria has always re-invented itself in a bid to improve service quality, empower employees, and match international standards. Hence operational innovation is a big deal for banks.
Sterling Bank is thus fully engaged to digitally transform her business by redefining Customer encounters, enabling Employees, Optimizing Business Processes, and innovatively transforming Products and Services.
Because of this, Sterling Bank leaped to invest in a centralized communication and collaboration platform that can keep up with the pace of the Modern Workplace and facilitate secure, rapid information sharing.
The Solution deployed
To support Sterling Bank’s journey towards the realization of these objectives, Wragby Business Solutions and Technologies deployed Microsoft Teams as the centralized communication hub for Sterling Bank. Microsoft Sharepoint, Kaizala, and OneDrive were also integrated with Teams to provide secure chats, file-sharing, and document management.
Drawing insights from our experience, Wragby combined the deployment of Sterling Bank’s 4500 seats of Teams seats as an Intelligent Application Platform with our matured Adoption and Change Management(ACM) methodology. A unique methodology, WRAGBY Acceler8 plus, is a re-incarnation of Acceler8, our mature blend of Microsoft’s change management solutions. Leveraging on the Prosci ADKAR (Awareness, Desire, Knowledge, Ability, Reinforcement) methodology, “WRAGBY Accere8 plus” provides customized engagement and training programs to position customers for long-term success with Microsoft Teams. The framework also leverages the Microsoft Fastrack program Orchestration portal, using its business intelligence dashboard to provide a view of customers’ usage growth.
In February 2019, our Customer Success Team kicked off with a Business Decision Maker Workshop using the Microsoft 365 Teamwork assessment. Drawing insights from our experience, Wragby combined the deployment of Sterling Bank’s 4500 seats of Teams seats as an Intelligent Application Platform with our matured Adoption and Change Management (ACM) methodology.
The Result
By engaging productively with the customer, we succeeded in driving wide user adoption for Teams across the organization. 3280 (70.54%) of the company’s people now use Teams, and Sterling Bank is reaping the benefits of better, faster communication.
Since moving to Teams and its SharePoint-OneDrive-Kaizala cloud, the bank has experienced a considerable reduction in missed internal meetings and increased real-time collaboration, especially among the back-office staff. Equipped with data encryption and two-factor authentication, the bank feels an increased sense of security when employees handle sensitive information. The bank also witnessed a 60% conservation of user mailboxes, as team members take to collaborating on documents via SharePoint while sharing documents links via OneDrive rather than as attachments. The bank, thus, reduced its employee dependence on emails.
By deploying our adoption and change management program to drive effective teamwork, we were able to optimize the bank’s investment, and Teams is now the core communication platform in Sterling Bank. This development has enabled employees to connect and communicate across departments, locations, and devices. Ultimately, the solution we provided has empowered the employees, increased employee satisfaction, improved risk management, and reduced operating costs.
During the on-going COVID-19 lockdown, Sterling Bank, like all Teams customers, witnessed a massive return on its investment, as it allowed most employees to securely work from home regardless of location, devices, and internet quality. The sheer number of active users on Teams in the bank both encouraged and facilitated this seamless transition.
Looking Ahead
As Sterling Bank continues to build on the success of the Microsoft Teams deployment, the bank is poised to further innovate and enhance its operations with initiatives like artificial intelligence and machine learning to provide personalized banking experiences
This will not only optimize internal workflows but also offer customers more intuitive and seamless services. With a strong foundation in place, Sterling Bank is well-equipped to navigate the evolving financial landscape and continue delivering exceptional value to its customers.
The partnership between Wragby and customers in the Financial Services industry continues to set a new benchmark for digital excellence and operational efficiency. By fostering a culture of continuous improvement and innovation, Wragby is empowering more organizations to achieve long-term success and make positive impacts on the community they serve. The journey of transformation is ongoing, and the future holds endless possibilities for growth, collaboration, and success.
