When it comes to dealing with financial matters, there is little room for error. While a manufacturing company might be able to have a slightly higher defect ratio and simply allow consumers to return or exchange products, banking centers can’t just allow defects in their process and have customers that are happy with returns or exchanges. The goals of a banking center are complete customer satisfaction, and the efficient operations that produce that result. In order to achieve these goals, Six Sigma Training can be employed in many cases.

For example, imagine that a banking center has a customer complaint ratio of one complaint for every 1,000 customers. In and of itself, that doesn’t seem like a bad ratio of satisfied customers to those who aren’t as happy. However, you must understand and work under the impression that there is ALWAYS room for improvement when things aren’t operating at 100%. Sure, 1 in 1,000 might not be bad, but what would happen if the Six Sigma Process was employed and created a plan to get the complaint ratio down to the standard 3.4 parts per million that it is based on?

That means more satisfied customers, a more efficient operation, and more success for the banking center that is embarking on Six Sigma Projects. For a practical application, it will be demonstrated that a banking center has a drive-thru time of about 2 minutes per transaction on average, and there are always two employees working the window. However, the inside services are much more time consuming, and there are always too many customers and not enough tellers. The average transaction time for counter services is about 6 minutes, including the wait.

The numbers can be analyzed, business flow can be measured, and it can be determined that during all business hours except for the lunch rush and between 3:00 P.M. and 5:00 P.M. there is only a need for one teller at the drive-thru. This takes the drive-thru wait times up to about 3 minutes per transaction on average, but allows the face-to-face transactions to improve in their time because that second teller is operating as a counter teller during the hours that they aren’t needed on the drive-thru. Now, the counter transactions have an average time of about 4 minutes, which is a big improvement in overall customer satisfaction. This is just one example of how Six Sigma Training can be employed to benefit the banking industry, but proves that process improvement is always possible with Six Sigma.