Macquarie’s Banking and Financial Services Group has an important focus—to empower its people to innovate by equipping them with exceptional data and technology-driven solutions so they can provide their customers with real-time, highly-secure and reliable platforms and services capabilities.
To achieve this, Macquarie’s Banking and Financial Services Group needs to ensure its employees are set up for success. For Richard Heeley, Chief Information Officer at Macquarie’s Banking and Financial Services Group, this means providing them with tools that will help them feel empowered to innovate, iterate and enhance the customer experience.
“If you build an incredible employee experience, then an incredible customer experience follows. You have to think about the two collectively to build and maintain a successful business,” says Heeley.
Macquarie’s Banking and Financial Services Group’s technology strategy focuses on reliability and velocity of delivery, investing in its people and adopting market-leading technologies with customers at the heart of every decision.
One element of this strategy: harnessing Slack as a productivity platform.
“Slack will help us continue to drive customer success by increasing the cadence of delivery, reducing friction points and simplifying processes,” says Heeley.
If you build an incredible employee experience, then an incredible customer experience follows. You have to think about the two collectively to build and maintain a successful business.
Minimising context switching with Slack Integrations
To drive productivity and reduce friction, Heeley set his sights on building an ecosystem around Slack—one that centres all of Macquarie’s Banking and Financial Services Group’s existing tools, workflows and conversations in one place.
“I’m focused on reducing the complexity of technology so we can combine our tools, people and partners and drive work forward,” he says.
Macquarie Banking and Financial Services Group have harnessed Slack integrations—the ability to integrate industry-leading software and custom apps into Slack—to bring the custom-built tools and apps that employees use each day right into the platform.
“We decided to pull all of those platforms together into the Slack ecosystem. If we could eliminate context switching, remove friction and introduce a simpler way of resolving incidents, we could deliver a far superior customer experience.”
Empowering employees by reducing collaboration friction
By having all its tools in one place, Macquarie’s Banking and Financial Services Group can minimise any collaboration friction that can impact productivity. It harnesses Slack Workflows—the ability to automate everyday tasks both inside and outside Slack, with no coding required—to improve employee efficiency.
For example, Macquarie’s Banking and Financial Services Group is looking to simplify an array of complex and time-consuming processes through Slack, making it easier for employees to communicate and collaborate to deliver outcomes and solutions faster
“Our customers want everything delivered at ‘the speed of now’,” says Heeley.
“Gone are the days of having eight hours of scheduled downtime. Customers want instantaneous responses and we need to be there for them whenever they need our support.”
“We decided to pull all of our platforms together into the Slack ecosystem. If we could eliminate context switching, remove friction and introduce a simpler way of resolving incidents, we could deliver a far superior customer experience.”
Continually iterating and delivering exceptional experiences
Ultimately for Macquarie’s Banking and Financial Services Group, customers sit at the heart of everything it does. As a result, every technology decision needs to enable its employees, so they, in turn, can continue to deliver exceptional experiences for customers.
“We wanted a world-class employee experience to match and enhance our customer experiences. Once we had that goal, it was super easy to dive into Slack.”
“With Slack, in tandem with the other elements of our technology strategy, we’ve reduced the complexity of our technology real estate and brought our people, tools and partners together to work effectively as one,” says Heeley.
