Total 650 words used.
Every day, Bank of America customers complete more than two million ATM transactions, place more than one million calls to the Customer Service center and use online banking services more than twenty million times. With such a heavy volume of customer interactions and focus of service availability, Bank of America has well-defined engagement, triage, and service restoral processes and protocols. It also utilizes mobilization, collaboration, and productivity tools to identify issues and restore services in a timely manner. However, in silos these tools and processes were disjointed and reactive, offering no real-time resource availability or centralized situational awareness view. In the spirit of continuous innovation, Bank of America seized this improvement opportunity and developed Virtual on-Watch, a system that transformed triage management at the bank.
Virtual On-Watch (VOW) was devised after triage that required multiple escalation levels to get the correct, and most importantly, available resources to join a call. After performing further analysis, it became apparent that there was significant interest in the bank to be able to get visibility into who is working on which issue during outages/incidents, since paging someone who is already engaged on another problem was not uncommon and often delayed issue resolution.
Additionally, it became apparent that as Command Center was mobilized during service disruptions, there were many manual tasks/processes required to begin triage initiation. Engagement of the correct resources, immediate access to appropriate communication channels and tools, ongoing communication to key stakeholders and maintaining situational awareness from the start of the incident were only some of them.
Given the volume of daily customer transactions and continual focus on keeping business critical applications and platforms available 24/7, the Operational Intelligence team created VOW and has transformed the way bank triages incidents.
Innovation
Automation significantly simplifies the incident bridge line creation and maintenance, opening of tickets, and provides all the pertinent information on one screen with only a few clicks – saving precious time during initial triage phases. It also provides real-time bridge information and status updates in one place, enabling accurate decision making prior to and during triages.
However, the most innovative feature of VOW is its ability to determine appropriate support groups to be engaged for faster service restoration and to identify available resources with capacity to work on that incident. VOW integrates with the bank’s on-call scheduling system and videoconferencing/bridge platform and pulls paging and real-time attendance information for subsequent analysis and correlation.
One of the recently deployed features allows paging of available resources right from the same UI as opposed to swiveling between multiple systems, further simplifying triage management, and decreasing service restoral time. It also improves employee satisfaction by reducing paging of teammates who are already engaged on another assignment.
Not every triage is managed by the Command Center, and now, support teams across the bank leverage VOW to manage resolution of less critical issues. Aside from all the capabilities offered by VOW, adoption of VOW delivered high level of standardization and transparency across bank’s Application Production Services teams.
VOW has been highly praised by Bank of America executives, who have gained real-time operational transparency into all on-going issues and triages across the bank from a single dashboard.
Aggregation, analysis, and reporting of on-call engagement data also led to another significant improvement, providing intelligence into on-call rotations and associated challenges. Some of the key questions that VOW helps answer are:
- Are teams staffed appropriately?
- Are rotations optimized?
- Are there imbalances within teams in who responds to calls and often requested to join calls?
- Are some team members overstressed?
- Talent distribution and team member effectiveness.
As a result, VOW offers in depth analysis of resource engagement over time, cost of paging/engaging resources and identifies on-call coverage improvement opportunities.
Realizing the uniqueness of VOW and the value it delivers to the organization, in November 2022 we filed a patent application with the United States Patent Office on the central features of VOW.
Nomination Title: Virtual on-Watch