High street banks have spent much of the last 30 years herding customers towards cheaper channels like call centres, websites or mobile apps. In many villages, towns and cities across the UK, retail banks retreated from the community and relied on electronic channels, with mixed results for customer experience.
Events such as COVID just added to a sense of disconnection between branches, digital channels and customers.
The rapid rise of disruptive fintechs has heaped further competitive pressure on established banks and pushed them to reconsider their client relationships.
Starting in January 2023, HSBC decided to do something about it. The global bank rolled out a training programme, designed to make its team more empathetic, and customer experience a priority.
Making CX a priority
“If you [go] back 30 or 40 years, local banking customers are absolutely at the heart of what banks did. The bank manager knew people, they had personal relationships and so on,” Becky Moffat, head of customer proposition and marketing with HSBC, told Customer Experience Magazine.
“The adoption of technology has changed the way we do things… and this is, a re-engagement, a reconnection, with what retail banking has always been about, which is serving customers,” she explained.
HSBC started its quest with Customer Connections — a four – month pilot programme across 700 members of staff in its UK Direct Mortgage team.
The scheme, which won three gold medals at the UK Customer Experience Awards in October 2023, wanted to enable the bank to have brilliant conversations with its customers.
The starting point was to make team members aware of the impact of their communications with customers, by getting them to listen back to their own calls, and critiquing them.
Credit: www.simonhadley.co.uk
“The biggest thing we found in this project is a lack of self-awareness and a lack of connection with customers,” said John Sills, managing partner, with the Foundation, the firm that designed and developed Customer Connections for HSBC.
“People need to listen to their own calls — they need to know what they sound like,” he added.
Once mortgage associates and advisors were aware, they were in a better position to have better conversations. Early data suggests that Customer Connections made a near-instantaneous 10 point improvement in the Direct Mortgage team’s net promoter score.
The connections programme evolved beyond the Direct Mortgage team. It became CARE — connected, accountable, responsive and empathetic — a global initiative to put customers at the beginning, middle and end of its operations.
CARE is about “listening to what your customer is saying, and [asking] how do we respond to that. It’s about being empathetic and walking around in their shoes”, explained Moffat.
Although the rollout of CARE is ongoing, HSBC is already seeing “really positive results”. There is a material lift in NPS values and CSAT figures from the branch networks and telephone channels.
Employee experience component
Although CARE is a customer-centric programme, it’s fuelled by a powerful employee experience component.
The staff involved with Customer Connections reported enjoying customer calls more. Although no figures on staff retention were available, anecdotal feedback suggested that ‘colleague satisfaction’ increased as the programme rolled out. And “as we all know, happier colleagues, equal happier customers”, said Sills.
There has also been a sharp rise in call efficiency, as staff feel they’re better able to make an impact. “If you build an environment where people enjoy what they’re doing, they do it better, customers get better service, and [employees] want to stay,” explained Moffat.
CARE is currently being retro-engineered into the DNA of HSBC, particularly through the onboarding processes for new joiners. The ability to show empathy with a customer has become a key requirement during recruitment.
Equally, the bank changed how it hires staff. It now leverages experienced people “who know what they are looking for”, to lead the recruitment process.
“It becomes a mutually reinforcing learning programme. If you want to recruit the right people, you need to have good people, who are really good at recruitment. Then you need to make sure you stick to your standards. We’re always looking for the right people, rather than just people,” added Moffat.
Only at the CX starting line
Despite the extensive training programme of the last 18 months, HSBC is still at the start of its CX journey. By the end of 2024, the bank — and its 45,000 employees, in 17 countries — will have completed its foundation-level training in CARE.
At this point, “all the bases should be covered, and everybody should be onboard”, said Moffat.
Then the hard work begins as HSBC makes CARE a core principle of its operation.
“Connecting and understanding customers is something that needs to be part of our DNA. It is a huge project in terms of getting the systems, the processes and the initial training in place. But fundamentally, this just has to become ‘you’,” explained Moffat.
Once the training phase is complete, it becomes about relentless improvement and constant measurement. As part of its global system rollout, each employee has a customer experience goal on their score card.
NOTE: This article was originally published in October 2023, CXM Review #3