Total 650 words used.
On March 13th, 2020, Fidelity sent most of its staff home. Overnight, the organization pivoted to a remote environment remaining focused on delivering a world-class client experience. On top of this disruption, retail investing boomed. Investors added over 17 million accounts industrywide in 2020 and over 20 million in 1st half of 2021. This trend extended to Fidelity’s institutional business, which experienced 23% year-over-year account growth in 20211. The FI Quality team embraced creative solutions to help ensure the organization continued delivering a world-class client experience during these disruptive times.
Record volumes required additional resources to meet client demand. To help the business quickly meet staffing needs the team positioned its subject matter experts2 as reservists for support during periods of extreme demand. The team performed analysis identifying high performing areas3, which allowed the team to pivot attention to higher risk areas. One such area is increased sampling of new hire work. These changes allowed the quality team to focus on identifying errors to help prevent potential customer impact (ensuring a positive client experience) while also providing critical feedback to new processors. In 2021 the team identified 49,559 errors, an 11% increase over the prior year4. Moreover, the team’s error capture rate increased 3% in 20214.
Researching errors and providing performance coaching to help prevent future errors can take significantly longer than reviewing accurate work. Between reservist work and additional volume support, FI’s Quality specialists absorbed over 10,000 hours of overtime in 2021. Realizing high overtime is unsustainable, FI Quality analysts identified and built several time saving automations. The team developed automations to help perform reviews for bulk entered requests. The team utilized bots to restrict accounts and send automated email notifications for errors requiring immediate attention. These examples illustrate how the team is helping to eliminating manual work while reducing risk to the business. Through automation the FI Quality team creates value which could be equivalent to a 100% work review. These efforts helped strengthen the business partnership, through knowledge sharing and helping to ensure timely and accurate execution of customer requests.
The remote environment coupled with high volumes made scenario-based coaching a challenge. When Quality team members began encountering consistent issues with a specific transaction that could have generated 3,600 potential privacy errors annually it became clear the team needed a way to engage every processing associate. The FI Quality team devised a solution to offer virtual coaching at scale working with internal business partners.
This approach helped spread awareness, improved processing accuracy, and reduced high severity errors significantly. Within weeks of implementation the errors went down by 4%. FI Quality has discovered internally that statistical analysis shows a high correlation with quiz performance and accuracy. The business is now using quiz results and processing accuracy metrics when making work assignment decisions.
Technology also helped maximize reach when fostering a culture of quality across the enterprise. The team developed a quality focused enterprise-wide news story celebrating World Quality Month. Despite launching Thanksgiving week, it was the top performing (as measured by views) Fidelity article of the week and among the top articles for November. To build on that success, the team championed messaging across the organization by distributing a video, “Sustaining a Culture of Quality During Disruption”, along with talking points for FI’s managers to use when engaging operation associates in conversations focused on the importance of quality.
Proactive and consistent engagement focused on quality helped drive Gartner’s Culture of Quality survey results in 2020, earning Fidelity the #1 ranking out of 147 companies. Overall results were a Culture of Quality rating of 70.5%, with Gartner’s average Culture of Quality benchmark index during that same period coming in at 47.8%. Going forward, the FI Quality team plans to continue to look for new and creative ways to help engage a hybrid workforce. The team will also continue to embrace automation as a driver.
