MANAGING PRODUCTS AND SERVICES
Operations
The main role of a product or service manager is to ensure that the bank’s products or services:
- Deliver the promised solution to customer;
- Achieve the planned revenue;
- Reach the volumes planned;
- Gain the desired market or value share;
- Are up to date with any improvement or change arising from changes in the customer’s preference, legislation, and technology.
The product or service manager is the ‘responsible person and expert on the product or service’ in the bank. Any question, issue, decision, or action related to it must start and be managed in the product or service management area.
To deliver what is required, a few tools must be available to the product or service management area. Most important is daily or weekly access to information that provides an understanding of the performance of the product or service.
This is not only sales data, but all the indicators that inform the manager of the overall performance when delivering what it promised and when bought by a customer, as well as any regulatory requirement.
In most banks, a product or service manager will not have all the indicators daily, but they must be available on at least a weekly basis, otherwise any response to issues can be too late.
Most managers devote a lot of time and energy to managing their products or services. They may not have all the required information in a fully automated system, linked to all key areas that deliver the product or service to track the product or service performance. Normally they don’t need to, and to get this level of data frequently can be very expensive.
Many banks have a fraction of the required data available in a data repository. To get the data that the manager requires, they need to be creative, and sometimes require the data to be manually input to Excel-based spreadsheets. When relying on manual input, it is essential that the data is reliable and to perform constant random auditing, while seeking to have as much automation as possible. It is important not to wait for full automation before the bank tracks product or service performance.
When performing the data audit, a few points must be observed. Anyone involved in providing manual data must know that a random quality check is performed, and that data is found to be grossly incorrect for any reason, consequences will follow. To underpin the importance of manually entered data, and guarantee reliable data, the consequences should be widely publicised.