Problems

I organized ethnographic researches, face to face interviews and shadowing tests in commercial and retail banking branches located in two major cities in Turkey: İstanbul and Ankara. While doing the research we realized that employees were very interested and helpful with the research and the application which would come out of it. As a result of that, our research revealed some main problems that most of the employees faced with in everyday work life but no one in the headquarters was aware of.

We listed these below:

Long Waiting Time For Approvals

There are different softwares for different types of tasks. When an approval awaits, user needs to check that particular software to see if there are any approvals. For example when an accounter is waiting a transaction approve from retail manager, she/he notifies the person with microsoft lync, e-mail, phone call or directly shout.

Security

As I mentioned above, some role groups spend most of their times out of the branch and that cause long waiting time for approvals. When there are some emergency approvals, related role group (sometimes even the branch manager) share their password with other employees in order to login to computer and approve the request. It is forbidden to share passwords but if they wait for the approval they might loose the customer. Eventhough this is seen as "urban legend" for headquarters employee, for the field users this is a completely casual situation.

Accessibility Issues

Sale-focused roles such as retail banking managers, spend most of their times out of the branch in activities such as customer visits. When an employee is expecting an approval from this role group, they are waiting for the person to come to branch, login to their computer and approve their request. Because most of softwares have been developed as desktop application.

Tracking The Requests

Users need to login into many softwares to check the status of a request. Especially new employees are lost in the case of tracking the requests since they are not familier with the softwares.

Password Reset

When a user forget their password or when their password is blocked due to wrong entry tries, they ask other employees to create a password reset request. Because they can not log into computer and there is no other way to create a request.

Contacting Other Employees

When employees are not online on their computer, contacting them is a problem. Especially branch employees need to manually add teams phone number and keep it up to date.

Objectives

Notification Center

When an employee is requesting an approval they need to notify the approver via Microsoft Lync, Phone, Email or just yelling. Because they are not aware of a request waiting for their approval. We created a notification center on the top of the application which warns the user instantly.

Grouping the Transactions

Instead of signing to multiple applications, we grouped the transactions based on their attribute: approvals, requests and etc. And when the user selects the group, all requests or approvals from different products are listed in the same page. This approach will enable us to add more transactions into software in future.

Corporate Directory

When employees are out of the branch they are not able to access other employees phone number when they need. Eventhough when they are in the branch, they can find the phone number only in the outlook directory. We added a phone directory in the application where all the phone numbers are listed with a search function.