RECOLLECTIONS & MEMORIES IF YOU CAN DREAM IT, YOU CAN DO IT

BOB KNOX (RGS 1958-1965)

I came across the Walt Disney statement, “If you can dream it, you can do it”, in the mid-1990s when I was preparing a presentation for my colleagues at HSBC. The concept that you could do anything if you put your mind to it, drove the success of the project of improving the customer experience.

Let me put this in context.

I started life in Battersea/Clapham and my family were rehoused to Merstham council estate in 1953. After passing the 11+ in 1958, I attended RGS. At school, I was in the fife and drum band of the Cadet Corps, playing the bass drum and, on one occasion we played at the Royal Tournament. I was also a member of the very first maths set who took our O Level a year early under the tutelage of Robin Bligh. My parents sadly died in 1962 and 1963. With my parents dead and very little money, I left school at 18 and joined Midland Bank in Redhill. Having worked in many branches in the southeast, and at the regional office in Maidstone, I eventually found myself as the Senior Assistant Manager at the Eastbourne branch, where I became President of the local Institute of Bankers. My main guest at the annual dinner was the President of the CBI, which was holding its conference in the town that year. As a result, I became one of the youngest Fellows of the Institute, aged just 34.

I later became a senior tutor at the bank’s management training college at Betchworth where, on two occasions, I undertook leadership workshops for the RGS Sixth Form in 1983-84.

For six years in the 1980s I worked at the SE regional office in Maidstone undertaking three roles and eventually became Deputy Regional Director looking after all the branches in Kent, Surrey, Sussex and Hampshire. For a brief period in 1986 I visited Belfast once a week during the troubles to assist with the sanctioning of loans in branches of the Northern Bank.

My next role was as a Senior Project Manager in UK operations, in charge of finding ways to improve the way the bank’s Direct Debiting system worked. My research involved not just talking to customers, but to originators and the Consumers Association. The ensuing system proved highly successful and was eventually adopted by all the banks, with me chairing the APAC’s interbank committee. This system is still in use today and saved the banks millions in fraud and errors.

I was then asked to review customer telephone services which, in 1992, were all branch based. Eventually, as Head of Customer Services, we rolled out the new service to all branches over a two-year period. Until then, the only way customers could find a telephone number for their branch was by receiving a letter or looking in a telephone directory! We were the first bank to put telephone numbers on cheques and statements, making it easier for customers to contact us. As a result, call volumes increased exponentially, which was exaggerated by the advent of mobile phones.

In 1996 I was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and Manufacturers (FRSA).

There were many technical IT and telephone-system issues to overcome which involved me undertaking research in the USA, Canada and Europe but, by the end of 1999, I had 3,700 staff in Hemel Hempstead, Leeds, Swansea (where the first ever Welsh-language call centre was established), Edinburgh and Hamilton. By then, all the other credit card, insurance and business call centres in Southend, Leicester, Birmingham, Stoke-on-Trent and Southampton reported to me and had adopted the same systems and business practices. One of the early challenges was introducing local pay scales which involved interesting discussions with the trade unions.

As a result of the ever-increasing headcount, I then established call centres in Hyderabad and Bangalore in India and later in Kuala Lumpur. There were some 2,000 staff working in these sites all servicing the UK. The Bob Knox Road

Show took place from 1995-2004 where I went on the road talking to as many of the staff in the centres as I could, including in India and Malaysia. Without the enthusiasm and the excellent quality of the staff we would not have been successful, so I felt it important that they had access to the ultimate boss to challenge me on ideas and management issues. This is where the “If you can dream it, you can do it” became the driving force.

Despite media concerns about call centres at home and abroad from 1999 through to 2004, the Consumer Association voted HSBC (Midland merged with HSBC in 1993) the best bank for quality in their call centre services. In 2002 I received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Institute of Customer Services.

Much of my role was about researching ideas to improve the customer experience and this included being involved in the early days of internet banking and at one stage with Sky and TV banking which only had a short life. During this period, I was also Chairman of the Speakeasy Club –an industry-wide organisation sharing best practices.

In 2004, my final role at the bank was to undertake a full strategic review of