Banco Galicia lowers costs, improves help desk support

How can you help a help desk? That was the question facing Banco Galicia. Today, Banco Galicia is the largest private sector commercial bank in Argentina and a wholly owned unit of the Grupo Financiero Galicia holding company.

Based in Buenos Aires, Banco Galicia operates about 600 branch offices and has more than 6,200 employees serving approximately 3 million customers. The bank’s business is profitable and growing. Net income last year totaled  35.2 billion Argentine pesos (approximately $514 million USD), more than  three times higher than the previous year.

But trouble was brewing at Banco Galicia’s help desk. Beginning in 2008, the bank recognized that its help desk’s operations had become inefficient. Too many incoming requests were being elevated unnecessarily. Too many onsite  visits were being made by third‑party maintenance providers, often at a high  cost. And too many inquiries about the bank’s applications, operations, commercial decisions and rules were being handled inconsistently.

These performance issues also created another problem. Since Banco Galicia’s help desk is run by the IT department, employees lost confidence in that  department. 

Supporting the help desk

To help resolve these issues, Banco Galicia opted to outsource portions of its IT help desk to DXC Technology. The DXC business process services (BPS) team took over support of business applications for the bank’s branch employees. The bank, however, retained IT support of its call center. Over the next few years, DXC’s contract was expanded to also include support for the branches’ PCs and office applications and building maintenance. This work was originally supported by a DXC team of about 40 people, which scaled up as Banco Galicia doubled the number of branches.

DXC, along with a small number of partners, has successfully and efficiently provided technical support helping Banco Galicia employees with software, email and IT infrastructure issues. DXC and partners also support urgent and nonurgent requests related to bank building and equipment maintenance. Bank employees needing technical assistance can seek support via multiple channels, including phone, email, web tickets and chat.

The results have been impressive. Banco Galicia improved quality of service. What’s more, it’s being done at a far lower cost.

By outsourcing its help desk, Banco Galicia also dramatically reduced unnecessary escalations of service tickets and inquiries. This lets the DXC team focus on high-priority requests. It improves the user experience by offering more modern and proactive options, and it allows everyone to get more work done in less time. Employee confidence in the IT group has been restored.

“Success is measured beyond contractual indicators,” says Hugo Busso, the bank’s employee support controller. “It’s also in the quality and friendliness of attention, the outstanding adaptability to changes and the constant search for improvements and value generation.”  

Automating processes with RPA

DXC and Banco Galicia have continued to introduce new innovations, adding robotic process automation (RPA) to help speed resolution times and modernize the overall platform.

In all, more than 40 applications have been identified that could benefit from RPA, and of these, 20 have been implemented so far. These include automatic identification of callers, scripts to speed the resolution of repeated incidents and cleaning of temporary files. RPA was also used to automate the compilation of a daily status report, a task that had been done manually for many years. Now, the report includes numerous data points for the previous 24 hours, including the total number of calls received, changes in service levels, the top five call drivers and even the top 10 callers.

Another RPA implementation handles most-used applications. This approach speeds the work of DXC agents that need to run multiple PC applications to resolve employee technical issues. Rather than requiring an agent to separately open each PC application needed to resolve an issue, the automated tool opens them all at once. While the savings in time may sound small, when it comes to resolving employees’ technical issues, every second counts.

Creating a close partnership

Banco Galicia and DXC also have enjoyed another benefit from their work together.

“Our relationship with DXC exceeds the formality of a contract between customer and supplier,” Busso says. “We’re closer to a relationship of partners seeking a common benefit. And DXC is an excellent partner.”