Link CX Deliverables with Business Deliverables
Matteo Pomoni, Global Head of Retail Daily Banking at ING discusses what it means to be customer obsessed in an intentional, scalable and measurable manner.
Topics
“The best way to add value to CX metrics is to link CX deliverables with business deliverables. When you are able to connect your NPS with churn rate or with the profitability score, you will have a holistic view and enrich your internal discussions to add better value,” says Matteo Pomoni, Global Head of Retail Daily Banking at ING.
Having a CX-driven tech stack, and using modern customer feedback strategies are a great way to measure the success of the CX function, but is it enough? According to Pomoni, everything comes down to being customer obsessed and letting every member of the organisation involved feel the pain of a customer’s negative experience.
Excerpts from the interview
How have CX expectations changed in the retail banking industry?
Five years ago, if we had provided our retail customers with an easy digital experience, it would have been enough to get good feedback or to improve our brand. Today, it is not only good enough but also not at par with what we see available in the market.
Three significant elements define customer experience— the first of which is velocity. A few years ago, giving a personal loan or a credit card in a few days would’ve been a good customer experience. Today, they expect it in an instant. Second, personalisation. Customers expect us to know them, and provide a superior personalised digital experience.
And finally, it is about the connection with super apps. Customers love to spend their time on apps such as Booking or Amazon. If we want to make a difference in customer experience, we need to ensure that, as a bank, we take the conversation to platforms where customers love to be. We need to be where our customers are taking financial decisions to support them.
What advice would you give teams to build an ideal CX tech stack?
When you build your solutions, always put the customer at the centre. It always starts with solving a customer problem. The first step should always be to understand their needs and preferences through market research and feedback collection, and then design solutions that can provide superior seamless experiences across channels.
Additionally, ensure your campaign management can provide a consistent value proposition and experience across channels. Having an open architecture is also essential. To build dialogue with clients when you are also outside of your platform, you need to make sure that your technology is open to embed the experience of other players.
How can business leaders measure the success of the organisation’s transformation efforts on the CX function?
One of the best methods to measure success is to collect customer feedback. There are different indexes that we can take into consideration. We have NPS, customer easiness score or the customer satisfaction score, which are all CX-related information.
The best way to add value to CX metrics is to link CX deliverables with business deliverables. When you are able to connect your NPS with churn rate or with the profitability score, you will have a holistic view, and enrich your internal discussions to add better value with better CX.
What are the new approaches to gathering valuable customer feedback, and how can they inform marketing efforts?
There are two main valuable sources of data for collecting customer feedback. We collect feedback from external sources such as Google or Apple stores, where customers rate the brand’s quality. Then there are the internal feedback strategies, such as NPS, that we collect across markets. For immediate feedback, we also touch base with clients, and ask for direct feedback after they buy a product or execute a transaction.
All insights are critical because they help us not only to understand how we are doing but also to benchmark our performance against our main competitors. You need to be able to link the data sources as they complement each other.
What does it mean for an organisation to be customer obsessed?
The word obsession is to make sure that the customer matters at all levels of the organisation. We might think that only the front-end functions need to be customer-centric, but it’s not. Customer obsession should be cascaded across the whole organisation.
For instance, in most of our markets, we create touchpoints with all functions every week. We list a set of feedback and identify the meaningful ones, both positive and negative feedback. We make certain that everyone in the organisation is aware of it. The trick is to make sure everyone in the organisation knows about it. It shouldn’t just be contact centre agents that discuss what went wrong with the client and feel the pain. Everybody involved should feel that pain.
Brands need to invest in solutions to access the granular levels of customer experience and identify the primary pain of the clients and how it can be solved.
