S01E02: Building a Fully Flexible Workforce and Operating Model by Connecting Front and Back-office

You are listening to 'Ops Game Changers', the new ActiveOps podcast where we share real-life stories from remarkable leaders who are revolutionising the world of service operations. In this series, we explore some of the key challenges faced by service operations as they strive to deliver more capacity, more productivity, and more business impact. Host Bhavesh Vaghela (CMO at ActiveOps) quizzes his guests on how they went about unlocking significant value, adopting best practices, and experiencing some game-changing results. 

In episode two, we dive into the topic of flexibility in customer service and the importance of maintaining service levels during peaks and dips. To address this topic, Tom Frosina, Head of Card Operations at TD Bank, joined us.  As one of North America’s top banks, TD Bank differentiates itself as a brand rooted in a desire to give its 27 million customers, communities and colleagues worldwide the confidence to thrive in a changing world. This Ops Game Changer shares how TD Bank utilised the capacity available in front and back office teams interchangeably to become an early adopter of this technology and implement a flexible structure to transform and improve the customer experience and reduce operational costs. 

Tom shares his insights into the challenges they faced during busy times, such as during the pandemic, and how they were able to train front office (call centre) and back office (operations) employees to be flexible and adaptable depending on service demand. 

Throughout the episode, Tom shares how TD Bank experienced greater agility and efficiency by giving employees the experience of working both in the front office and back office. Teams were able to share capacity, appreciate the challenges that each department faces, and therefore gain knowledge, insights and greater experience which in turn lead to higher employee engagement.  

Tune in to this fascinating episode to learn more about TD Bank’s experience in transforming its operations teams to become 100% remote why this has had such a positive impact on employee engagement and, ultimately, resulted in consistently higher levels of customer service even during the busy times. 

Want to learn more about how to radically transform your company through the power of operations? Then don't miss the following episodes and hear more fascinating insights from other leaders in the field of Operations about how they have overcome challenges to drive productivity and boost performance at their enterprises. You can listen and subscribe to ‘Ops Game Changers’ on your preferred podcast platform and also on our YouTube channel, AOTv.

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Transcript

 Ops Game Changers Podcast  S01E02 – TD Bank  

Bhavesh Vaghela: Hello, and welcome to Ops Game Changers, the podcast series 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 Vaghela. I'm the Chief Marketing Officer at ActiveOps and in each episode I'll be honing in on a particular KPI or a particular challenge that a business has solved. I'll delve into how they went about doing this and explore the outcomes achieved.  

Today we're delighted to have Tom Frosina join us. Tom's the Head of Card operations up at TD Bank, and I guess you could say Tom and his team are pioneers in transforming this whole idea of connecting front and back office. Really the concept of trying to share capacity amongst those groups, you know, with a key driver, obviously to improve customer experience.  

So that's the topic for today. And before we jump into that topic it's about time we introduce Tom. So, Tom, welcome to Ops Game Changers. Thank you very much for joining us. 

Tom Frosina: Oh, great to be here, thank you Bhavesh for having me. 

 Bhavesh: So, Tom, I always ask this question of all the Ops Leaders and all the Ops Game Changers that come into this podcast, I'm curious to know how you ended up where you ended up. How did you end up in operations? 

Tom: Oh, you know, I think when I first came out of school, you know, I started to work actually for Citibank, this is way back in the in the mid-eighties. I was working in the branch network. It was a role I had, and I did work branches for a number of years at close to 10 years in New York. But the part that really excited me, even though I tend to be more on the front office, dealing with customers and all that at times also was working with the back office teams that worked in other parts of the bank, and I got to kind of know them, and at 1 point, after about 10 years, one of them had gone to a session with, actually invited me out to a call centre and operation centre which I had never seen before, and I really had a great visit and talk with these guys. And a week later they said, “Hey, we've actually got an opening to learn the call centre. You've got really great experience in how the branches work. We'd love you to kind of join the team”. And you know that happened in 1994, and I pretty much have never looked back. 

Bhavesh: That's fantastic. I think it's actually, I mean, it's quite a common trajectory where ops leaders have come from working in the different parts of the bank, you know it's really fascinating that happens. So, listen, before we jump into the topic at hand. I guess you know, when we think about TD Bank, you know, I think you America's most convenient bank. I think that's the phrase that that goes with. That's the tagline you know that I guess it comes with a whole lot of pressure, right? You've got to drive great customer experience for your customers. I think you got circa 10 million customers, a large workforce, and I know you've got a large operations team. So how do you go about managing day to day operations at such a scale? I mean that that must be some, some, some feat. 

Tom: It is. Well, thank you again. Not all 10 million are initially my charges for, say, with the overall bank. But you know, in our credit card division, you know, we have probably, you know, close to 2 million customers. So many of them are overlap, and also to one of the divisions I work with actually came into this organization with our private label, sales finance. So, these customers actually are not ours directly they’re our partners. So, they they're doing financing. For example, they might go into a large furniture retailer want to purchase some furniture, and the one do the financing. We're the ones who are doing it. So, we also have to have not only the consumer, but we also have that partner who wants to be very happy with the service that we're providing them and so on. So really, it's just focusing on what's most important to it. So, I mean, yes, the end consumers are most important game. And I think, to the first question you asked me. One of the things I think that's helped me in my career is I never want to be too far from the consumer. I think when you get deeper into an organization, lose track of “hey, that consumers only one or 2 people away”. All the people who are actually handling those contacts, be it a frontline person talking on the phones or in a back office, they know the experience. What really helps me get through is understanding “what do I need to do? What do my teams need to do? Who's focusing on the consumer who's focusing on the partners” and making sure these groups are constantly talking because when one goes off on the others in one extreme, one goes to the other, we're going to lose that connection, and that service is definitely going to suffer. And then ultimately, our business. 

 Bhavesh: Yeah absolutely, you know. I guess that that's a good segway to kind of what we're going to be talking about today in terms of the topic. And you know we're seeing a growing trend I think not just from the US but actually across the world of this idea of, you know, how do I use my resources that I have to my best capability to drive in this case customer experience, so it could be improving experience, or whatever the combination of those are. or, in fact, you know, reduce cost, which is kind of a big chunk of that. And part of that is really you know, bridging the gap between front and back office. And you know the contact centre in the back office. I know, you know, you guys have been really driving that agenda, you know, within TD Bank, I mean, maybe if we start at the at the beginning. I mean, what kind of drove you to do that? What was the thinking behind “can we actually connect these two?”  

Tom: Well, it's always just some necessity pulled it up, right. We had something that popped and in one case we had a large amount of volume hitting our back office, right? And not staff necessarily to handle it, but also, we also knew it was a temporary event, right? This wasn't a change where “yes I'm gonna have to hire tens and 20 staff on going”. Yeah, I might have needed to adjust hiring a little bit, but I really need to get through a bit of a bulge for the next 3 to 4 months. And then, of course, we've used AOM before. So, in our back office we to put a lot of these metrics in place. So, we already knew kind of where our volumes were when they came. More importantly, and this is really important my back-office folks started to cross train themselves with different groups. Because normally, for example, a lot of the stuff would happen in some of my regulatory businesses, more complex work, too. I couldn't necessarily take somebody from the phones and just say, “hey, go and work in this highly technical, regulated thing and knock out these claims.” 

That wasn’t going to work but what I could do because we had already done this work is I could move one of my phone people into my customer service back office here, which is a very similar job. Then move that person one step over and sometimes move that person when stepped over. So we're able to do you know, these 2 or 3 way trades internally to get people who had already had experience, who already had some of the knowledge, because otherwise bringing on sometimes bring on new people to an organization that's under a lot of pressure is actually worse, because it actually drags you down because you've got all these new folks you have to worry about quality and productivity. We're moving people over who had already done that work from time to time, too, but we had to replace them and had to replace them. So, I think what we did is we worked through that process. But again, yeah, normally, in this case, it was, we had some driving in different businesses. And you know, we're seeing that overall, in business. I think the cycles have changed and moved to more rapidly in my experience in operations. I think a lot of it has to do with the consumer, which is I hearken back to. Years ago, there was a men's wear brand. I'm really aging myself here. They used to say they're educated consumer was your best customer, and they, which is true. But now the customers have so much information at hands that if they have any questions about a possible fraud, or they see something on their credit score that’s changed, they're contacting us right away, and this can increase our volumes if something happens. Think of large breaches happening. People get very concerned with the impact. During the housing market got really hot here. During the pandemic a lot of people were applying for new. They found out they might have been something on their bureau of which, incorrect, created a lot more temporary seasonal volume for us. So, when these things started happening, we had to be sure that our teams were very flexible to move. I was lucky for us a lot of times. We've also seen it, not hitting the same errors at the same time. Sometimes the phones would get a little bit quiet, as we have more digital engagement. But then the back office would have to do some of the work to kind of because now digital engagement is easy. The back office is getting more things to work through as well, too. So, with those changes, we just have had to remain very flexible. But you know I'll probably jump to one of the questions you might have later is you know, what would I have done better? I probably would have practiced a lot more of this stuff before I had that tidal wave, right? It would have been a lot easier just to try it. Like, why do you need people here? Our service levels are great, like, yep, let's get it ready, because you never know when it won't. It turns fairly quickly on that piece as well. But again, the most important thing is having that data and moving.  

Bhavesh: No, as I said, I guess you have to react don’t you, fast. Yes. And you alluded to point about the data being able to do that. Now, before we jump into the data question, what's fascinating for me is you've got 2 groups there, one back office and one call centre. Dare, I say, are completely different beasts terms of the type of individuals working there, and type of work that's required. I mean, how do you? I guess there's 2 sides that come from that one is, how do you make sure people are skilled in order to do it? Different types of work, and all that are flexible? And, secondly, how do you even get them motivated to even, yes, I'm going to be spending half a day doing, I was doing calls now I'm doing something else. How does that work? 

Tom: Right? So, I mean the one base skill they all tend to share is system knowledge which I can't underestimate how important that is too, but it is a very different thing. I've always kind of alluded to, you know, call centres are like restaurants, right? People come in when they want to come in. They want to eat the food. The food needs to be fresh, and at the end of the night, if you didn't sell all the fish, you just got to throw it out meaning if you have extra capacity, no one cares. You have a lot of extra capacity. 1130 at night. If people want to eat it at 80'clock at night.  

Back office is completely different. It's a warehouse. Things keep coming in, and you can just work that inventory all the way through, and if you have to work later, you can get it out and knock it through. Because the customer has., yes, to certain expectations the customer has, but it's not necessary in the moment it might be in a 24 h period. So, the thing with our staff is we try to find people who are geared to that. Phone people, yes, it's a very tough job, you know. I'm gonna be scheduled. I have to take my calls, but when I'm done, I hang up my headset, I go home. The day is done. Back office is a little bit different. It's a different pace, right? I might be able to get up and go grab a cup of coffee if I feel like one at you know, at 1030 in the morning. But by the same token, if the work doesn't get out, we'll really need to have to ask people to work overtime be more flexible work through the lunch to get it done. So, it's 2 different mindsets. So, I think, also, when we look to move people from the front office to the back office. and we've done it the other way, too, but let's focus on this one. We do ask people like, “hey, this is what the job entails”, right. Some people on the phones will say, “hey, I just want to get off the phones” like “understood. But let's explain what this job would be like. We might need to stay a little bit later. Right? You know you won't have your schedule, might be changing day to day, and how work goes through. You won't have, you're gonna have to be more self-motivated to keep grabbing the next piece of work versus the work coming to you”. It's subtle. But some people really said, “yeah, they want to do it”. And they go into the back office and say, “no, they just can't work in that environment”. 

Bhavesh: They can’t do it. 

Tom: And that's fine. We bring them back. And also, that's one of the things about doing this kind of work that's amazing is people who said they always wanted to get off the phones and go to the back office, some of them have gone, and they have moved on and become careers in the back office and moved up to managers. Others have gone for a week or two and say, never mind, I like what I'm doing here… 

Bhavesh: It’s not for me. 

Tom: …and do it differently. So, you have to understand. It's just this slightly little nuances. So, when we do these efforts, we will make sure our managers know what they're looking for and have the other manager contact that manager. So, they're all aligned and just pretty much tap people on the shoulder., give him a couple of minutes to understand how it's going to work, because we don't want to put them in a bad spot, and of course we don't want to put ourselves in a bad spot. 

Bhavesh: Yeah, no, totally. And I think I guess over time, as you've been doing this, you create a kind of a midpool don’t you, of people you know are gonna go back and forth and just give you the ability to flex that that I guess that capacity right, depending on what's happening in the business as you go along. So, you know, what was the reaction from staff then, when you, when you started to do this, was it? Was it trepidation was it positive? 

Tom: I think, for the most part it was a positive trepidation. I'll take both your words, I think. Yes, you're excited to do it. It's something different, you know, and they want to learn something new. But of course, people are normally nervous. A little bit of a change getting into new work, new routines, new management things like that. But I think you know, once they get through the first couple of weeks, they realize it's different than the phones. But again, maybe not so different. If I'm doing a back-office customer request to change an address, update a profile. It's what I used to do when they were on the phone. It's just a different pace, slightly different processes. And then if they get used to that, a lot of them have said, look, you know, now they can migrate up, you know, kind of upstream to a more difficult work type all the way to our regulatory pieces, you know, they really kind of enjoy that journey and things like that. And again, it gives us some career paths and different opportunities for folks as well. So yeah, I think no one just kind of jumps in and says, yeah, I can knock this out the park. They understand that they're gonna have to learn and go through those pieces. But again, we get we get the data. So, we also understand, you know, if the people aren't doing very well, we might just say, “hey, thanks for trying. Maybe the phone's better for you”. And then also to down the road, when we've had openings in the department, we know a pool of people that say, “hey, these are opening. But you really like this work we liked when you were here, we should make sure that you put your name into the hat when we come down the road to [indistinct]. But again, the most important thing for us to as a business was, we get these seasonal pushes. So, I talked about earlier with you prior to this. You know, we're having one of our major retails are doing a big push of a of a sale today, and they do this twice a year, but after they do the sale, we'll get some incremental volume on fraud and things like that, because they do an enormous push at once. So, I will have to then deal with that maybe in our back office while I'm doing it within the phones today, I'll deal with that in the back office 45 to 60 days. I'm already figuring out. So come that day, sometime in October I'll have to move a few people back from the front office to help that volume out. But I can't go to my bosses and say, you know, I need to hire up 20 people, then get rid of them then hire them up and get rid of them. But this is yeah, this doesn't work at all. Nor is it a smart business move. But this has really allowed us to flex it. And again, the backup, the phone centres, we have amazing information with the tools of switches. We know everything, volumes, and all that. The back office is something we didn't have. You know. We added AOM, I first started with the AOM when I was with Barclays back in the UK in the early, you know, 2010s, and then I brought it in here back in 2018, to 2019 to my back office here. Now we have that same data. So now we know when these things are happening, we can start to understand when it's creeping in and what moves we need to make, and also too we know what our capacity is going to be like. So, if we're going to have one of these surge events, is it the same time we have another surge event that maybe we've got 2 things coming at the same time? Or maybe we have a lull. And then another part of my back-office operation, and they can actually kind of, you know take care of it internally. So, with having this data then married up with. Hey, how my phone send is looking in October. It looks not great this week like, for example, we rarely move these people on Mondays, because that's our very busy day in the call centres. Tends to not be a super busy day in the back office because they tend to get mail come in Mondays, and they work out on Tuesday. So, by having a data from both sides, we can really make some more educated decisions on when we want to send folks over, and when we need to move them back as well. 

Bhavesh: That's really interesting. I think that that I guess it comes down to visibility, doesn't it? You've got that data on both sides, even though they're measuring different things, depending on the front versus back. But you're seeing a clear, clear picture is that was that kind of really the game changer for you, bringing that the data together in order to 

see your resources in a in its entirety rather than the, you know the specific groups. And if that was the case, what was the journey? Or you know for the data. How did you get about, you know, providing that level of insight for yourselves?  

Tom: Yeah, I think I think anecdotally, we always knew it. But the data helped firm our decisions up to say, this is the right thing to do. But also, it helped us do it. So, we said, Let's move, yeah, 20 people of like you know what, really, we only need about 7, right? You know, 20 would have been overkill. We would have put our phone system in danger too. I think again, with the phone side we always had the data. You know. I argue an hour in a phone system. You could spend a month going through the data, right? The back office we didn't have that until we brought in things and brought an AOM to do that work for us.  

And now my managers can actually self-manage. And they’re now managing, they kind of know what they need to do the next couple of hours. What they need to do this week, and what they know what the next month is going to be. And of course, things get a little fuzzy when you go out. But now we've got a couple of years of history, it's feeling pretty good. So even when we have something like the pandemic which, completely through volumes, because for a little while we had no front volume right? There was no sales going on, but other volume started to come in from consumers and things like that, we were able to quickly adjust our people and staffing because we kind of said, you know what we've seen this before, and in a smaller effect, Here's the multiplier of it, this is the kind of staff we're gonna need. And we can work through that. And then, you know, now, we've really kind of married up the data. So, when I have kind of my group calls, I had one early this morning and I have my back-office folks talking my front office people talking. And we're already kind of seeing, you know. Okay, was it like the rest of this week? What does it look like the next couple of weeks. Is there anything big on the horizon that we need to start planning for? And you know I do that at a high level. But, more importantly, these guys are doing it day to day, and their teams and with each other, and the teams are starting to cross pollinate. And when they start doing that, then my job becomes far more easier because it's just kind of becomes a self-adjusting system. 

Bhavesh: Yeah, totally. I think that's a I guess that's the key, right? Because you, you provide the data and the insights that enable your teams to flex and react. And particularly do that in real time, with close to real time as possible in order to, you know solve the business challenges that you have you're faced with and that's a fascinating kind of position that you're in. So, as you've been doing this, and as you've been kind of sharing resources, have you, have you seen kind of a big improvement say in, you know the utilization of capacity? Have you seen, you know better customer experience. What is being the output of some of this? 

Tom: Oh, yeah, so absolutely on those pieces, too. So, for example, right now, because of where we are cycles in the business, and actually our front office has very, very low attrition, which is for a call centre a great thing. But actually when your volumes are coming down a little bit. You have low attrition, then you're kind of overstaffed a bit so. But we had done none of this right now. My front office would be hitting 95 plus percentage service levels, which is over performing to some degree. Right? You know, we're answering that phone so quick, the customer doesn't have a second to wait. Not that you want to wait, but a second to is not too traumatic, but my back office was seeing some, you know, extra volumes coming in due to the changes. So, I'd have one group doing really well in one group just burning out, you know, on the other side. So, by able to do this and be able to figure this out pretty early, hey, we can move people over. We can solve this ourselves; you know. I would say in the past we would have treated these as separate systems. We would have said, oh, I need to get 10 more people in my back office, your front office. Yeah. But they're separate things. Not anymore. I mean, what we really do now is we solve it for ourselves, and only when we find something in the back off it says, look, this trend in the back office is not gonna change. I'm gonna need 5 additional staff, because eventually some of these phone people need to go back. Then I can make a more educated decision. Say, look, here's what we've able to do. Here's what we saw versus just trying to throw people at it, which, if you throw people at it, it's not necessarily meaning its gonna to solve the problem. If it's a short-term issue, then you're gonna have another issue down the road where my back office is over staffed. My front end might be in a different shape. So, it really allows us to kind of marry up these 2 things, and just constantly course to jump. And I will tell you for probably 89 percent of the time we're able to handle it. I mean, what one big thing is we're putting in another new system in one of our other areas for our credit, and we still have the old system. So, we have the new system in the old system, the kind we're working You know we're working in parallel as we offload the old onto the new. Both have back-office work that has to be done on the systems. Things that kind of fall out naturally, you know, fall to be work. But now, because we have both systems, we have double that fall out work until we get on to one. So normally, we originally had planned with the roll out to say we might have to take a pause before we roll out new clients, we said, you know what? We don't have to do, what it says. We have enough people in our front office that I can spare over there. We can keep running this thing in parallel, because the faster we get it done the faster on the path to just the one system. Instead of dragging this thing out over 8 or 9 months, we can get it done over 8 or 9 weeks. So that's something we can give back to the business, doesn't cost them anything extra right? We didn't have to go and hire staff to do this, and we got to go through a change cycle much quicker, and on the other side of that change cycle is better service for our customers actually improved approval rates for our customers, which meant more business for us overall. Again, just having it being able to flex 3 or 4 people could make that happen. 

Bhavesh: It's really interesting, because it sounds like such a simple thing to do, but it’s not is it, I mean, it's a difficult task. When you have thousands of employees in both sides to invest in resources 

Tom: I think I've been pretty lucky; I mean, I've always had pretty much front and back offices together. you know, I think you know even when I went to, we started this story here when I went to the call centre, we created this call centre. They had was only a call centre was in It was in San Antonio, Texas, and most of the branch networks were in big cities. New York, San Francisco things Chicago. They built the call centre in Texas for various reasons. Then they eventually started to bring the ops in. So, as they brought the operations in from these marketplaces, us phone people had to help get them started. Kind of incubate them, too. And that's what I kind of really learned like, we can really start to connect these, because historically, they were not connected. Different divisions, different groups. Yes, they might have at some senior VP level might have met, but they didn't talk to each other on a daily basis. Now they were in our same building. Now they were a lot of times our same people we helped see those groups. So, when I kind of learned that back in the mid to late nineties when we built, I said, this is something I'm going to do going forward. And when I worked at other jobs, be it a Capital One, CIGNA and Barclays, I always had a front and back office, and I always enjoyed having that. Some people, you know, I work with peers and things like that. They chose one of the other. I always chose both. Just to get this flexibility also, too, is you know, if you don't do your front office right? You can bury your back office.  

Bhavesh: Oh yeah completely.

Tom: And vice versa. The back office doesn't do certain things. They can do it the other way, too. So, I was like, no, we're in the same team. We're going to figure out how to way to get work down to the back office so they can work on an action correctly, not have to go back and correct and go back to the customer and try to get approvals. But again, also I was also able to move these people move managers around and really build those synergies. 

Bhavesh: Yeah. And as I said, it's very logical when it's, you know, it's obvious that that's going to be there. But it's harder to do than actually think about. So, you know, I guess when you if you're thinking it through and you know clearly you guys have got a kind of well, well, oiled machine, in that sense that you know to flex, and you've demonstrated great value to the business. If you were going to advise one of your peers that perhaps is going to go down this path, what would you kind of say is, you know, the 2 or 3 things that you must do, or gotchas. What tips would you give? 

Tom: Well, I think the first tip I would give is, don't immediately, you know. Think about making kind of those double trades. Right? Don't assume you can take a person that's inexperienced and put them into a very tough piece. Look at your internal teams, and how can you move people up right through the group, too? because that's where I've seen this fail before. They port people to teams. They just can't hack it, and it costs it drags down both the person as well, both teams, because they don't have the resources, or it's a new person, too many questions. So, look to make what I call those kind of double trades around the organization where you move another group over. I think that probably is the essential piece, too. Also, don't be afraid that if it's not working out well, change out the people, right, in a nice way. Right? You can say, “hey, look you said you. We sent Morgan down there. Morgan, you know that was good. Maybe you know this may not be for you. We're going to move someone else down”, and probably what we do is we don't. We always pretty much don't tell them any given time. We say, look, we'd like you to move over. It's going to be a rotation. It could be anywhere from 4 to 8 weeks, and we'll keep you updated and get them to accept it. That way if they have to move on to something different, we can take them out, or if we need to keep them longer, because they're doing really well, we can have that conversation. So, it's also making sure you set the correct expectations with the people. Right, you know, also to making things like, yes, you will be going back to the phone someday. Or if, hey if I get really busy on the phone, I might have to yank you. I'm not going to yank you every 2 minutes like, “get on the phone”. But it could be a day a week and try to get that. Also, that’s the thing, try to get that organized. If you feel like you're gonna be pulling people left and right, you're gonna get nothing done. So, what I've done like in this current thing is pretty much Mondays. They're on the phones. What I've done in other cases. I've split the team in half. I said, okay, you people might be on the phones Monday, and Tuesday, and then you guys will be on the phones you know. Wednesday, Thursday, and the other days you'll be doing the back office, and everyone does back office and Friday something like that. That's one thing, too. If you start jerking people back to roles it's very inefficient, and you'll burn the people out and that get there. So yeah, I think the most important thing is just be realistic to what work you want to put the people into, and then be feel free to kind of you know, trade the people out, if necessary, in a respectful way as well, and how you set that up.

Bhavesh: Of course, I think and have you seen I don't know better staff engagement, or better kind of well-being, or your staff are better engaged because they feel, to a certain extent career path for them to be able to learn more things. Have you seen that improvement since you've done this?  

Tom: Yeah, absolutely. So, I think. Yes, the career path has helped. We talked about it a little bit earlier. Either people who have found opportunities or realized this is not for them, but they got that free trial before. It's much better than getting a job and being in it a week and go “Oh, my God! I made a big mistake”. But also, people have just gone there, and they they've come back. And I've actually heard these things in teams. And they said, “Boy, you know what I didn't understand in the back office, you know, they have to deal with this. So, you know, this is what we should do in the front office” just getting their peers together, like we're putting a lot of pressure in that office because we forget to ask one question or forget the fill in one field correctly and vice versa to the back-office people. They'll start meeting with the phone people, and they'll say, you know, “what's it like on the phones”, and they'll tell them what they go through. So, there's always a greater appreciation. You know. People always think the grass is greener like “all the people in the phones, it's an easy job you just stand there, and you just talk to people”. Then they kind of realize what it's like, day in, day out, being on a schedule. All that, too. And same thing in the back office the phone. People say, “oh, it's so easy they don't have to worry about a schedule. They can go get coffee when they want”. Then they actually work and realize, hey, boom, something happened. There was a system problem. Instead of getting 50 requests. We have 100, and we have 1,500 requests. We’ve got to knock out in the next 2 days, and we got to burn through it and understanding that's different. So just the appreciation of what the other side is going through one gives them, they better work with each other, and also two, they try to say “hey, how can I help?” 

Bhavesh: Yeah 

Tom: I didn’t know that was a problem. And that's an easy fix. So, some things are bigger fixes. But sometimes, like Boy, that's easy. We can do that like that. 

 Bhavesh: and that, that, you know. That's probably the aha moment. Isn't it?  One of the by-products of this is your teams work better closely, and you actually improved processes. Increases the data to flow because it makes it easier for each side. I mean, it's a fascinating story, and I think you know, more and more organizations are going down this path. They're trying to figure out, almost changing it from being departmental or product into customer focused. So, what's the customer journey looking like? Which is effectively what you've done is you've been able to manage that based on how the customer interacts with you. So, it's a really fascinating journey you've been on, and you've clearly, you know, been through this number of times throughout your career and kind of honed it, and it's fascinating and valuable for other peers and other listeners of ours who we want to go down this path as well. So, before we wrap up to ask you a question, because I'm very curious about this, and I've been asking a lot of key operational leaders and game changes like yourself. What you think the future looks like for operations. If you're going to put a crystal ball in in the next 5 years, what do you think it's going to look like? 

Tom: The next five years, I mean, it's really changed. And one thing I was reflecting on early was when I first we first started having like online banking, and even back to IVRs and things like that. You had to do this huge push to try to migrate customers to it. Now it's the opposite. Customers are complaining that your systems aren't good enough. Why do I have to talk to somebody? Why isn’t your digital system better this way? But I've seen this in a couple of places I've worked. So that switch, I don't quite know when that happened from how we could. People want to be digitally engaged, I think that's one thing we have to be sure is, but not everyone does. So, we have to be ready for how the customers want to come at us per se, right in in a nice way, right? There are customers, who want to become digitally engaged right? And we have to make sure our tools capture that, and that we can actually address those things in the way they want to see it. But at the same time, we have to be available the traditional ways when something doesn’t go wrong. And as I tell my phone people, you know, more and more people want to be digitally engaged. So, when they contact you, for example, on the phones they're already a little aggravated. They couldn't do it themselves. So, you have to keep that in mind, not take it personally and figure out what was the issue that prevented that from happening with, you know, maybe it's capability, maybe something that the customer didn't do correctly, whatever enjoy it. So, I think we have to be open for all these different channels to customer to come in, and I don't think they're gonna settle on one channel in the future. I think it's going to be kind of this omni-channel thing that we're going to have to deal with, and we have to make sure that to the point of how do we figure out? How do we work it? You know, I don't necessarily think it's having an Omni Channel rep, who's handling emails, chats, and phone calls on the same thing because we've tried that that doesn't always work the best, but we do need to, you know, be more integrated. I mean one thing I see in operations coming down the road too is making sure that, you know if a customer does something digitally, I want my reps to know that it occurred so that when the customer calls in, the customers shouldn't have more information than you do, you know. So, I think that's one of the challenges. Sometimes the technology will move so fast is we making sure we're integrated with all that technology to do what they're doing. Again, customers, as I kind of said earlier today, too, customers have a lot more information available about themselves because of our digital channels in all digital channels, people doing a lot of the credit check programs and things like that. So, they're getting lots of information you know. Sometimes trigger concerns which might or might not be valid, but they need to want to contact us, and we have to be able to answer them. And again, a lot of this stuff like I said, can come really quickly if a new service comes on board, there's a massive kind of data breach. We'll get a lot of this very quickly where we didn't used to have that kind of impact. We’d come in more dribbles now come in kind of really as a as a hard slam, and then we'll recover through it. But I think you know just being ready to adjust to it, too. I mean I if anything, with the pandemic you know lots of things, you know, of course, negative across the pandemic. But we did lots to learn things. My team was not remote. We’re now 100% remote. We have no plans to go back. We are actually finding this model working better for us. Something that if you would ask me an early 2020 is that that's an interesting idea. It will probably never happen. 

Bhavesh: Of course. 

Tom:  Necessity made us do it. But now, through that, we've actually performed this. So, we've so again, I think the cycle changes are a lot quicker now. And we just, you just have to be ready to say, yeah, what worked for yesterday might not work tomorrow. And what’s gonna work tomorrow you don't even know about today. 

Bhavesh: Yeah totally. That's a that's a fascinating anecdote there around. You know, you 100% working from or hybrid, I guess, which is really, really interesting. It's interesting because a lot of there's a lot of commentary around the world about, how do we bring people back into the office, and that's a, you know, a different topic for another day… 

Tom: Absolutely. 

Bhavesh…but yeah, it’s fascinating to hear your take on that. So, Tom, listen. I think it's a really interesting and I really do think that… 

Tom: One last thing before I forget that if we hadn't done to this model, it would have been harder for me to move some of this work. So, for example, when I was more office paper based, I had a lot of my phone people in South Carolina, a lot of my back office in Northern New Jersey. People weren't doing that commute every day, but now that everything had to go virtual, anyway, if the person lived in Northern New Jersey, or lived in South Carolina or lived in California. I could get them the work. I couldn't get them the work before this. They had to be co-located in the same building.  

Bhavesh: So that's a very good point. And actually, that's by the digital transformation of consumers in the way we want to engage. So, I mean, I actually think the direction that you've been able to demonstrate the TD Bank and your previous experiences is really where, to some degree operations is going to head. Because, you know, I see a future where you know operations, departments and service operations teams are only gonna get smaller, but the results that you need are gonna have to become more flexible. And you're gonna have to deal with them across your journey, customer journey, rather than isolated. And you know you've demonstrated which I think really, interestingly, how you can flex all those resources which are two very different groups in a way that does drive business impact. So, I mean, thank you so much for sharing that story.  

Tom: It was great to speak with you again, Bhavesh.  

Bhavesh: Really really good. And I think that's a really interesting whole bunch of tips there too for other listeners to think about. Well, how would I do that if I was gonna move to that? You know that more flexible model. So, thank you so much, Tom, I really appreciate it. And also, everybody else for listening and for joining us. And please do check in on more of our episodes on Ops Game Changers. And you're gonna hear so many more fascinating insights like we have with Tom thinking about the sharing of capacity between front and back office, as well as a whole bunch of other topics so please do check it out and thank you so much for now and enjoy the rest of your day.