CONTINUE TO SITE »
or wait 15 seconds

Bank Customer Experience Summit

How banks can measure return on experience

Everyone is familiar with return-on-investment, but at times that may not be the best or only thing a bank or company should measure. A panel at the Bank Customer Experience Summit discussed how banks can measure return on experience.

How banks can measure return on experienceImage via Istock.com


| by Bradley Cooper — Editor, ATM Marketplace

Everyone is familiar with return-on-investment, but at times that may not be the best or only thing an organization should measure. With banks fighting for customers with neobanks and fintechs, they should also consider measuring the customer experience, particularly whether their solutions are delivering good return on experience. This was a topic panelists discussed in a session entitled "The Importance of measuring what matters," at the Bank Customer Experience Summit held in Chicago from Aug. 31 to Sept 1. The panel was sponsored by Shikatani Lacroix Design.

Jean-Pierre Lacroix, president of SLD, moderated the panel with Stephen Griffin, SVP, director of the Retail Distribution Planning Group at Regions Bank, EJ Kritz, EVP, Training and Customer Experience at apc and Sergio Magalhaes, director of Branch of the Future Development at Millennium bcp.

Lacroix kicked off the discussion with insight on a SLD study on how many banks were measuring return on experience. Less than half did so, and mainly focus on financial performance.

However, consumers, "evaluate banks based on experience."

Griffin said for Regions Bank, it measures a "a lot of different things performance-wise across the company, while like many banks there is not a direct ROE measure, and many don't have a direct measure." Regions Bank does utilize Gallup with employees to see how effectively they delivered customer experience. It also conducts associate engagement surveys for both front and back-office employees."

Griffin said the surveys also employees if they feel they are being led well. This can help determine if management is disengaged. His team has made it a priority to focus on this effort throughout the year, beyond just the two month period when the survey takes place. Through their surveys, Griffin found Region's employees to be very engaged.

"It gets a lot of focus for about two months out of the year," Griffin said.

With employees, Kritz said that in his mind, "Employee satisfaction is a metric is dead. I don't care if your employees are satisfied, I want them to be engaged."

He noted a study on how one bank had highly happy employees but were not engaged.

"We have to raise the bar with what we are measuring. Not to find out if they are simply happy but truly engaged. Happy employees do a fine job but they don't enhance the place or create the culture," Kritz said.

He added that when trying to engage with employees, banks need to keep in the mind the personality side. One bank tried to do pizza parties for back office employees, but all of those employees were highly introverted.

In addition, when measuring customer satisfaction, Kritz said at times it might not be good to incentivize it, since employees can't control if a customer is angry about a broken ATM.

Griffin agreed with the inventive point, saying that instead of punishing banks for negative scores to give them bonuses for good scores.

Magalhaes said that while banks have a huge amount of data, they largely aren't using it for customers, while meanwhile customer expectations are higher than ever and they expect to be treated as the "special one" in any channel.

Millennium Bank first addressed this issue by reinventing its branches with free Wi-Fi, self-assisted area and extensive employee training in customer experience.

Magalhaes said they used the idea of Route 66 to train employees, referring to the famous route in America and also the statistic that 66% of customers, "will change to another brand just because of a bad service. We put this into mind of every employee."

Millennium Bank turned Route 66 into a model that involved:

  • Receiving customer.
  • Obtaining information.
  • Using the resources.
  • Turning experience into results.
  • Exceeding expectations.

Since beginning the training, Millennium Bank consistently won high marks for its customer experience.

"Keep it close to the customer and measure what matters independent of what channel we use," Magalhaes said.

Lacroix thought this method would be useful for many banks due to its simplicity.

"Most banks do a fantastic job at marketing to consumer, they do a poor job marketing their employees," Lacroix said. "If you take the same discipline of communication and strategy to change management to employees and you make it simple to remember with Route 66. It makes it easier for them to receive."

Kritz added banks also need to be surveying back-office employees as well since they often determine if a customer is happy or not with the bank.

Lastly, Magalhaes said banks shouldn't ignore other avenues of feedback, such as user reviews of mobile bank apps.

"We need to measure everything we can," Magalhaes said. "Everything that is an interaction with a customer must be measured."


Bradley Cooper

Bradley Cooper is the editor of ATM Marketplace and was previously the editor of Digital Signage Today. His background is in information technology, advertising, and writing.

Connect with Bradley:  

Bank Customer Experience Summit


KEEP UP WITH ATM AND DIGITAL BANKING NEWS AND TRENDS

Sign up now for the ATM Marketplace newsletter and get the top stories delivered straight to your inbox.

Privacy Policy

Already a member? Sign in below.

  or register now

Forgot your password?


You may sign into this site using your login credentials
from any of these Networld Media Group sites:

b'S2-NEW'