Concentrate on Consistency. Win Customers
February 22, 2010
Abigail Johnson is vice chairman of FMR LLC, which owns and operates Fidelity Investments. She also is president of Fidelity’s personal and workplace investing business. These remarks are condensed from her keynote speech February 16 at 28th annual conference of the National Investment Company Service Association, held last week in Miami.
Being here today gives me the opportunity to share with you a passion. I like analyzing and managing large-scale transaction processing platforms, record-keeping administration, and brokerage training services.
There I said it. That may not be too newsworthy to many of you here today because you’re all thinking, “Well, of course, what’s not to like about mutual fund operations and technology?”
However, what I’ve learned over the last five years is that managing and transforming large-scale record-keeping and transaction-processing platforms is just as hard and in many ways more difficult than leading an investment management team. But I think it can have just as big of an impact on customer satisfaction and sometimes it can even be more fun.
So I’ll outline why we at Fidelity view ourselves just as much a financial information processing company as an investment management firm.
Fidelity has the largest mutual funds in the market and is a leader in online broker services. Fidelity is the number one provider of defined contribution savings plans, and a leading provider of defined benefit, health and welfare administration, and stock plan services.
Technology underlies nearly everything that we do at Fidelity, and has a dominant effect on how we interact with employers and customers.
Here’s a sampling of the technology infrastructure that we have at Fidelity. We have more than 10,000 servers and 60,000 personal computers. Last year, we tested more than 35 million lines of software code for security vulnerabilities.
In 2009 Fidelity technology supported over 22 million workplace participants; over 19,000 active defined contribution plans; more than 12 million retail customer accounts; over 212,000 average daily commissionable trades made by retail customers.
Even a small reduction in processing errors and rework can have a significant impact on the service that our industry provides to millions of customers.
Regardless of the exact methods used to measure and implement change, our goal has been the same – to increase efficiency while simultaneously enhancing customer service and quality standards. While a seemingly simple objective, this can be maddeningly hard to achieve.
Our experience has shown that eliminating non-value-added activities and streamlining processes invariably leads to a better customer experience and lower costs.
Our continuous improvement efforts are based on three key goals. Start by focusing on the customer need and then examine the process from the customer viewpoint. Empower employees to identify and implement improvements. And focus on increasing quality and minimizing errors and rework.
Nearly two decades ago, Fidelity installed its own work flow software system called Extract. When customers raised an account issue that our phone reps could not immediately address, the phone reps often had to contact an operations group to get the answer needed for the customer.
