Improving visibility at Bankwest

YakTrak gave Bankwest real-time visibility into coaching, customer conversations, and conduct risk — helping leaders strengthen support, improve performance, and make coaching evidence easy to retrieve.

Making quality repeatable: how coaching created a consistent customer experience at a big 4 bank

YakTrak helped a Big 4 bank improve coaching consistency across large contact centre teams — reducing handle time, lowering repeat calls, lifting engagement, and strengthening leader capability.

The challenge

The bank needed to make a consistent, high-quality customer experience repeatable across all voice interactions while reducing Average Handle Time (AHT) and Repeat Call Rate, lifting engagement, and reinforcing that Team Leaders’ primary role is to coach.

Program design

Core delivery phase ran over 5 months, with embedding and rollout extending across 18 months (including BAU induction support).

Participants

Australia:

378 frontline
27 Team Leaders
7 Leaders of Leaders
4 Executive Leaders

Offshore:

355 frontline
24 Team Leaders
3 Leaders of Leaders
1 Executive Leader

Total learning time

Australia: Leaders 22 hrs; frontline 2 hrs
Offshore: Leaders 26.5 hrs; frontline 6.5 hrs

YakTrak supported leaders and frontline by

Embedding a simplified, signature set of frontline behaviours to drive consistent customer experience
Building leaders’ tactical coaching skills to link coaching to metrics, performance issues and opportunities
Equipping Leaders of Leaders to coach and support Team Leaders to meet operational objectives
Creating coaching visibility and accountability across both frontline and leadership behaviours

The results

AHT down by an average of 17.4 seconds across 10 teams, despite increasing call complexity
Repeat Call Rate reduced from 25% to 19.6% across teams and was on track to reach the 15% target within the following 6 months
Employee engagement increased
Banker attrition reduced by 22% within the first 6 months
Noticeable uplift in coaching capability and consistency, with tactical coaching happening more often and at a higher quality

What this shows

Consistent coaching rhythms and clear behavioural frameworks can rapidly improve customer experience, performance and leader capability across large, distributed contact centres.

Client perspective

“A distinctive feature of the YakTrak (formerly GRIST) program was its seamless integration with contact centre objectives. Leaders and bankers worked collaboratively to ensure that coaching directly contributed to the success of our broader goals. The coaching journey has translated into tangible improvements in key performance metrics.”

Brad Thomas

Head of Customer Success

Brad Thomas is a seasoned leader with over 25 years of experience in senior leadership and people development.

His career spans a diverse range of roles, including more than nine years with Telstra, where he served as a learning professional and ultimately as Head of Organisational Development across the retail and contact centre network.

Brad went on to spend a decade with GRIST as a Partner and Director, working closely with some of Australia’s most recognised brands to shape high-performing cultures in people development, sales, and service.

In 2014, he co-founded YakTrak, a coaching and people development platform that has since become one of Australia’s premier solutions in the space. Under his leadership, YakTrak has empowered organisations to build stronger coaching capabilities and unlock the potential of their people.

Unlock potential with purposeful coaching at scale.

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