Associated Bank Leverages OpenSpan to Improve Employee Performance and Customer Experience

OpenSpan Inc., an industry pioneer in automation and intelligence solutions designed to gain insight into employee productivity, simplify transactions and engage employees and customers, today announced that Associated Bank is leveraging OpenSpan solutions to improve employee performance and customer experience in key customer service and back office business areas.

Headquartered in Green Bay, Wisconsin, Associated Banc-Corp (Associated Bank) is one of the top 50, publicly traded, U.S. bank holding companies. Associated Bank offers a full range of financial products and services in over 200 banking locations and serves more than 100 communities throughout Wisconsin, Illinois and Minnesota, and commercial financial services in Indiana, Michigan, Missouri, Ohio and Texas.

For several years, Associated Bank has focused on driving operational excellence, enterprise efficiencies and decreasing the cost of doing business. At the same time, the bank focused on enhancing the quality of service within its customer-facing business units.

Before Associated Bank began its transformation journey to improve operations, tracking day-to-day work activities performed by employees – also known as “colleagues” in the bank’s culture – was done via manual tracking and self-reporting. In the discovery stages of this executive initiative, it was evident that there was a deficit of data to clearly understand how employees were leveraging the systems and applications on their desktops. Not having clear visibility into a colleague’s work day efficiency made it difficult to pinpoint areas of improvement.

Associated Bank’s technology and operations teams began to explore methods to get the knowledge they needed to make decisions that would positively impact the business and help move their transformation initiative forward. Specifically, in finding a solution to help them answer a core question: How efficiently and effectively were employees using the technology, systems and processes to perform work?

“We knew in our pursuit to become a more metrics-driven enterprise, we had to make lasting changes at Associated Bank and get the results we wanted in terms of operational efficiencies, improved employee engagement and performance and reduced cost of doing business,” commented Caroline Shau, senior vice president for Associated Bank. “It was important for our executive team to have the visibility needed to make more strategic decisions, but this needed to be an all-in initiative. Our goal was to make this a standard analytics solution to be used at the executive level and down to an operational level.”

Associated Bank partnered with OpenSpan, a leader in automation and analytics solutions that support transformation initiatives in global FORTUNE 500 companies, to help lead the charge in capturing the big data required to advance their executive-sponsored transformation project.

“OpenSpan is a cutting-edge innovator when it comes to understanding how to approach a project like the one we had at Associated Bank,” said Kevin Tesch, senior vice president and process reengineering manager of operations and technology at Associated Bank. “OpenSpan has worked with some of the leading financial institutions across the globe, and we felt they understood our business objectives and they provided a solid roadmap for success.”

Using OpenSpan Intelligence, Associated Bank has been able to affect change related to improving how employees work and the processes used that have the most positive outcomes. “Using OpenSpan, we have been able to analyze how much time is spent in applications, the number of applications used and the complexity of processes,” said Tesch. “We are using this data to actively improve how our employees work and how they use the technology at their fingertips. These changes are having a significant impact on employee engagement. It makes it easier to complete tasks, which is indirectly impacting employee morale.”

“Leveraging OpenSpan, we have been able to get the visibility required to benchmark employee system and technology use, which is giving us the information that is critical to being more holistic when it comes to coaching and developing employees,” added Tesch. “In the first six months of using OpenSpan Intelligence, we have realized close to $750,000 in cost savings related to more effective utilization. By having a clear understanding of how employees are working and being utilized, we have been able to significantly drive down the cost to serve. We project that as OpenSpan adoption accelerates, we will realize between $1-2 million over the next several years. This level of intelligence has truly transformed the way we think about our business strategies and how we execute in terms of the service we offer our customers.”

“Becoming an intelligence-centric organization is critical to staying ahead in today’s increasingly competitive marketplace,” commented Anna Convery, chief marketing officer and executive vice president of strategy for OpenSpan. “We’re pleased to have the opportunity to work with Associated Bank as they lay the groundwork from gathering the workforce intelligence needed to invoke change in the enterprise that enables them to continue to deliver world-class customer experience while also managing operational costs.”

About Associated Bank

Associated Banc-Corp (NYSE: ASB) has total assets of $27 billion and is one of the top 50, publicly traded, U.S. bank holding companies. Headquartered in Green Bay, Wis., Associated is a leading Midwest banking franchise, offering a full range of financial products and services in over 200 banking locations serving more than 100 communities throughout Wisconsin, Illinois and Minnesota, and commercial financial services in Indiana, Michigan, Missouri, Ohio and Texas. Associated Bank, N.A. is an Equal Housing Lender, Equal Opportunity Lender and Member FDIC. More information about Associated Banc-Corp is available at www.associatedbank.com.

About OpenSpan

OpenSpan (www.openspan.com) is an industry pioneer in automation and intelligence solutions that help bridge people, processes and technology to gain insight into employee productivity, simplify transactions and engage employees and customers. Leading FORTUNE 500 companies leverage OpenSpan’s Automation suite of solutions to deliver faster, more seamless transactions that accelerate employee productivity and reduce customer effort while increasing operational efficiencies. Using OpenSpan Intelligence, these enterprises have a clear line of sight into workforce productivity to make more informed decisions regarding utilization and aligning human capital investments to production goals. To learn more about OpenSpan, visit www.openspan.com, or request a one-on-one demo with an automation expert –www.openspan.com/demo.

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