Transforming the customer experience at a top UK bank

When it comes to customer satisfaction, a bank often has only one opportunity to make good on a customer complaint. And if it doesn’t get it right the first time, there are plenty of other financial institutions waiting to welcome a new customer into the fold.

A major part of addressing customer concerns is understanding exactly how widespread a problem is and then coming up with a workable plan to address the issues and create solutions. For this prominent UK bank, determining what the problem was and how to solve it had become the problem itself! Although it had plenty of data and feedback, it couldn’t come up with a practical approach to improving the customer experience.

The bank’s leadership knew through various customer surveys and feedback from forums and events that the customer experience needed to improve. But poor survey quality, limited data integration, and manual analysis and reporting of customer complaints made it nearly impossible to act on this knowledge. Often, different business units and functional groups would implement separate initiatives to address problems, but their efforts did little to improve the overall customer experience and regularly created internal confusion between departments and branches.

Key metrics showed the gravity of the problem: the bank’s Net Promoter Score (NPS), a measurement of customer loyalty, fell to -29% from -19%; relationship manager satisfaction decreased to 69%; and complaint volume continued to get louder.

As we already had a working relationship with the bank’s parent company, we were given a one-year assignment to improve the way customers interact with the bank’s people and services.

The first step was to gather and analyze customer-engagement data, including surveys and transaction statistics. A data audit revealed a number of wasteful, non-performing activities in the existing analysis structure and identified the root cause as the lack of links between different sources.

We implemented the following solutions:

• An automated tool kit for customer-complaint reports: This helped tabulate and generate monthly complaint reports and provided drill-down options for creating customized tables and charts, providing a far greater level of analytical granularity and much more accuracy.
• A customer experience framework: Using historical data from surveys, forums, events, complaints, and employee surveys, we designed an integrated customer experience framework, which enabled the bank to customize its own surveys and questionnaires, ensuring better data quality and analytics.
• An integrated customer experience dashboard: To standardize analysis and reporting of customer insights from different data sources, we created an innovative dashboard for the bank. This dashboard includes custom navigation and drill-down dynamic charts that let users visualize customer experience analytics and key performance indicators, as well as compare results among regions. For open-ended qualitative feedback, the system relies on standardized sentiment analysis techniques that have been aligned with complaint data categorizations across the customer life-cycle stages.
• Sentiment analysis: By using a standard theme and sub-theme list that aligns with complaint data categories, we enabled logical linkages to be made.

By implementing our tools and redesigned processes, the bank achieved the following results:

• Increased first-pass accuracy to 100%
• Reduced processing time by 70%
• Generated upward trends in key customer-satisfaction metrics
• Lowered complaint volume

Now, the bank can get it right the first time, improving the
customer experience by using actionable data and insights to create programs that really work.