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Delivering exceptional customer experience in today's application economy

CA Southern Africa partners with Absa to provide a new, end-to-end view of customers' digital experiences.


Johannesburg, 11 Oct 2016

As part of a top-to-bottom renovation of its 24-hour Operations Command Centre, Absa has implemented a suite of CA Technologies solutions that enable the bank to see how customers use and consume mobile and digital services, in real-time. This has also made it possible for the bank to reduce trouble-shooting time by 50% year to date, significantly improving customers' experiences of Absa's digital banking channels across Africa.

"To deliver a smooth, well-designed and reliable experience, we need to know exactly how our systems are performing at any given point and what the impact of any problem is on the individual customer," explains Kevin Kay, Head of Service Assurance and Operations: Africa at Barclays Africa.

Fact sheet
Solution: Suite of CA Technologies solutions
Industry: Banking
Provider: CA Southern Africa
User: Absa

"The challenge is that Absa, like most financial institutions worldwide, has a highly complex systems landscape, from legacy mainframe systems to web-based and mobile applications. Business processes initiated by a client via the Absa mobile app, for example, may transverse through the technology stack to the backend mainframe and back again.

"As part of our Command Centre renovation, we wanted to be able to pinpoint each transaction's complex route through the various systems so we could identify blockages within minutes and resolve quickly."

Working with long-time partner, CA Southern Africa, Absa has implemented CA Application Performance Management, CA Infrastructure Management and CA Application Experience Analytics at its Command Centre, which is dedicated to proactively monitoring technology systems, customer experience and behaviour patterns, 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

These solutions are allowing Absa to gain a deeper, highly granular view of the customer experience across its entire business process.

"This product set offered the best fit and value for money for what we set out to achieve," says Kay. "We were also confident that CA Southern Africa had the right commitment and passion to help us get to where we needed to go."
Software roll-out is 85% complete but already delivering significant improvements, enabling Absa's technical team to quickly understand which system component is responsible for a less-than-perfect customer experience, what its impact is on customers, and how to address it.

"We will soon be able to view and better understand customer behaviour across all our digital channels, which in turn enables us to constantly refine the interface design and enhance the customer experience," adds Kay.

This approach supports the bank's adoption of DevOps principles within its technology environment, as it enables what is learned in the operational side of the business (ops) to be fed back into the development (dev) process, creating a cycle of continuous improvement that is driven by customers.

Dolf Snyman, Account Director at CA Southern Africa, says that in the application economy, technology and business are becoming inseparable. "Absa is right at the cutting edge when it comes to understanding how the performance of its technology goes to the heart of the customer experience, and this is a lever of competitive differentiation. We are proud to be helping Absa take its understanding of this crucial issue to the next level."

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CA Southern Africa

CA Southern Africa is the leading provider of IT management and security solutions in Sub-Saharan Africa.

CA Southern Africa enables customers to embark on the digital transformation journey necessary to seize the opportunities presented by the application economy. Today, software is at the heart of every business in every industry and CA Southern Africa is assisting its customers - through the use of technology, to change the way we live, transact, communicate, across: mobile; private and public cloud; distributed and mainframe environments.

For further information log on to: www.ca.com/za

Absa Bank

Absa Bank Limited (Absa Bank) is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Barclays Africa Group Limited, which is listed on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange and is one of Africa's largest financial services groups. Absa offers a range of retail, business, corporate and investment banking and wealth management products and services primarily in South Africa and Namibia.

Barclays Africa is 50.1% owned by Barclays Bank PLC (Barclays). At 31 December 2015, it had 847,8 million shares in issue and a market capitalisation of R121.6 billion. It operates in 12 countries with about 40 thousand permanent employees and it serves more than 12 million customers.

Its registered head office is in Johannesburg, South Africa and it has majority stakes in banks in Botswana, Ghana, Kenya, Mauritius, Mozambique, Seychelles, South Africa, Tanzania (Barclays Bank Tanzania and National Bank of Commerce), Uganda and Zambia. It also has representative offices in Namibia and Nigeria. Barclays Bank PLC has operations in Egypt and Zimbabwe which continue to be run by Barclays Africa operationally.

For further information about Barclays Africa, please visit its Web site www.barclaysafrica.com

Absa contact
Calvin Mashigo
Barclays Africa Group Media Relations
011 350 4663
076 400 9349
Calvin.mashigo@barclaysafrica.com

Editorial contacts

Deirdre Blain
Blain Communications
(+27) 83 230 5522
blain@iafrica.com
Joanne Cawrse
CA Southern Africa
(+27) 11 417 8645
joanne.cawrse@caafrica.co.za