Client Experience Needs To Be The Cultural Pivot in Banks
According to Gedeon Rossouw, Head of Client Care for Absa Corporate and Investment Banking, true client-centricity only emerges when a company is genuinely committed to prioritising its clients. This conviction drives behavioural changes towards a more client-centric approach.
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Absa Corporate and Investment Banking built its own comprehensive client experience framework and model as opposed to buying something off the shelf. This allows the brand to define the experience it is trying to create, aligned to its strategy, and then measure and iterate on how they are delivering on that experience, explains Gedeon Rossouw, Head of Client Care for Absa Corporate and Investment Banking. Why?
Clients are expecting the same level of hyper-personalisation from banks as they do from their retailer. Clients expect their banks to proactively deliver multi-product solutions too. This requires banks to have a much more holistic and integrated understanding of their clients expectations than they did in the past, he adds.
Gedeon leads the client experience management and complaints management capabilities. In this capacity, he oversees the effective gathering and understanding of feedback from clients and colleagues, translating it into actionable insights.
He leverages these insights to strategically and tactically enhance organisational efforts. He summarises his role as unlocking the potential within teams and organisations to generate mutually beneficial value for clients and stakeholders through actionable insights into their behaviour drivers.
Talking to Martechvibe, Gedeon talks about how Absa fosters a culture of continuous improvement and innovation in delivering client-centric solutions. He also gives his advice on enhancing these client experiences and shares insights on analysing customer feedback.
Excerpts from the interview:
How are SA customer expectations changing in the banking sector? What are the main challenges for banks?
Expectations of South African banking clients are becoming more complex as clients are increasingly comparing banks not only with other banks, but also to all other service providers, be it financial service providers or services outside the banking industry like insurance, telecommunications or retail. This requires the banking client experience to be as good or better than experiences they are having elsewhere. This means that clients are expecting the same level of hyper-personalisation from banks as they do from their retailer. It requires banks to have a much more holistic and integrated understanding of their clients expectations than they did in the past. Additionally, clients expect their banks to pro-actively deliver multi-product solutions. This means that banks cannot operate in silos or sell products in isolation any longer. This requires a different orientation and organisation of the business from a product centric approach to a client centric approach.
How does Absa foster a culture of continuous improvement and innovation in delivering client-centric solutions?
Absa has cultivated a culture of client centricity by starting with its purpose and creating a more purposeful organisation that genuinely cares about creating value for its clients. At its core it is about being a force for good and understanding that our success is an outcome of our clients’ success. Our strategy is aligned to our purpose and there is clarity about how each person needs to contribute to the strategy. Once our north star and strategy was clear, creating a client centric business was about generating high-quality data and insights that we can organise our deliverables around and ensure that we are able to actively measure the experience at a very detailed level. Next, we developed the ability to translate the data into easy to consume insights for the business, and empower teams to manage the experience in a way that creates transparency and accountability. Once we got the data transparency and accountability piece right, it started creating iterative client experience improvement loops.
How do you gather and analyse customer feedback to identify areas for improvement?
Absa Corporate and Investment Banking has built its own comprehensive client experience framework and model as opposed to buying something off the shelf. This allows us to define the experience we are trying to create, aligned to our strategy, and then measure and iterate on how we are delivering on that experience. The framework and model includes a range of qualitative and quantitative data collection methods that are employed strategically and tactically in a programme that creates iterative improvement loops.
Also Read: Open Banking To Play A Significant Role In The Fintech Landscape
What advice would you give to others who are striving to enhance their organisations' client experiences?
The most important advice I can give companies is that client experience needs to be a culture initiative at the top of the house. At a culture and purpose level, the client needs to be the centre of the organisation if you really want the right level of focus and support. It is only when a company really wants to be client centric and firmly believes that financial performance is an outcome of delivering value for clients when it will start changing behaviour to be more client centric. This can be done through proof of concepts that show the correlation between experience and financial outcomes. This entails building a strong research and data management capability and also by being able to provide very high-quality specific feedback, insights and actions on the client experience that translate into improvement loops so that business units can visibly see the impact in the clients’ behaviour and on their bottom line.
In what ways do you see emerging technologies shaping the future of client experience in the banking industry?
The advent of GenAI is similar to the internet expansion in 2000. It is a pivotal moment in our history that will change the way we work in fundamental ways. Companies who don’t embrace artificial intelligence and machine learning will get left behind. I think the two most exciting new technologies are the ability to measure solicited feedback in near real time through easy to use research tools that then create live dashboards of the experience as clients are having it. The other is generative AI’s ability to listen and analyse client information in real-time and in a way that provides you with a real time temperature check across multiple value propositions and journeys that will give you a real time view of how your actions and initiatives are landing for your clients from their perspective.
