Upgrade banks' branches

Usually banks open their branches in areas were they expect to have growth in the demand for their banking services in addition to the attempt for decreasing the load of customers on their current functioning branches.

Accordingly customers expect that they would receive identical services to the main branch of their bank and that by using the services of those branches they could save the trip to the main branch that is usually located far away from their residential areas.

Unfortunately, the reality is banks open extended branches that only provide basic banking services such as cash deposits, withdrawal, statements requests and the like.

However, services such as acquiring loans and mortgage requests are usually done in a centralised location which sometimes requires customers to travel between the emirates to get one of these jobs done.

This hassle of going back and forth between branches of the same bank is very tiring, time consuming and does not serve the purpose of opening branches in the first place.

It is not acceptable that such non disciplinary flow of business processes takes place in the information age nowadays. While people are getting used to de-materialised service procedures, banks are still struggling in serving identical services at their branches.

Inquiry

Banks should amend the services provided to customers in their branches in a way that shapes each branch to be one way stop for any inquiry or request their customers have. This may require the bank to make some alteration in their banking system in terms of distributing authorities and maybe adding more expert employees such as loan officers for example who could follow up the inquiry of customers no matter at which stage of the whole procedure they reached and no matter who approved the loan initially and if the rules and procedures are standardised all over the bank branches there would not be any problem in the follow up issue.

This way banks could utilise all of the resources available at their branches and simultaneously would be able to fulfil their customers' needs at many locations and points without hassling them physically. Banks would also make sure that the business flow is somewhat reasonably distributed in all of its branches.

We should not also forget the benefit of saving employees time as they would not have to listen to customers' requests and then eventually ask them to go to another branch where they could be served.

Finally, I think that following this new strategy in branches would lead the organisational chart of banks to be more flat and thus to empower their employees more which in turn would encourage them to produce both more effectively and efficiently at their jobs.

Hanan Esmail Al Sahlawi is a UAE columnist.