Transforming Customer Experiences with Continuous VoC Data: A Banking Case Study

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SubbaKrishna Rao

April 25, 2021

“Companies who implement a voice of customer (VOC) strategy generate a 10x greater year-over-year increase in annual company revenue,” – says research by The Aberdeen Group.

It has never been easy to know what’s on your customers’ minds!!

Today’s tech-savvy customers search for information about bank products and services using forums, social media, review sites, and other online resources. At the same time, they do not hesitate to share feedback about their own customer experiences using the same channels — rating the products, writing reviews, and sharing experience on every interaction with the bank that they both love and hate. Banks might view this as a liability as it comes with certain pain points.

But customer-driven banks view this wealth of customer data as an immense, never-ending source of customer intelligence.

Here is a video summary of the Customer Experiences with Continuous VoC Data: A Banking Case Study

What is customer experience (CX) in banking?

In banking, customer experience (CX) applies to all of the attempts to make each customer feel valued when they engage with your bank. It’s also the sum of a customer’s perceptions of all experiences along their entire journey with your bank.

Why is customer experience (CX) in banking important?

Until recently, several banks regarded customer service as more of a regulatory checkbox exercise than a powerful mechanism for driving commercial transformation. Banks have been losing the trick of being able to service consumers reliably in real-time and through various platforms with CX systems that do nothing more than send out surveys after a particular event.

In recent times, the marketplace differentiation is no more restricted to just price, location, or product – rather it is differentiated by customer experience. This is particularly true in the case of banks because most of the banks offer similar products and customers cannot really identify major differences between them. So the real difference can be made only by the quality of a bank’s customer experience offering.

Banking is a fiercely dynamic industry. Customers will go to a bank that is more welcoming if they find they can’t do business with one on their terms. A bank that offers superior customer experience will find:

That customer will start moving or consolidating all their banking requirements to that one bank that is offering a great customer experience
It’s easier to attract new customers
that customers who enjoy superior customer experience with their everyday transactions are more likely to progress to bigger ticket products such as mortgages.

Make use of big data and analytics to improve customer experience in Banks

Understanding consumers is the cornerstone of a long-term strategic edge in digital banking. Improving the retail banking experience necessitates a thorough knowledge of the clients and the ability to communicate with them in their own language. Having a 360-degree view of the banking customers, and using the data available are examples of this.

Big data analytics is a critical component in improving banking customer experience and making critical business choices. The importance of using big data analytics to achieve deep insights into consumer demands is growing due to rising volatility in customer needs.

With the help of customer experience analytics, banks can gather insights to segment customers, assess opportunities, and predict models to nourish engagements and increase the customer experience of digitalized banking services.

Alleviating The Pain Points

1. Humongous Data

Times when banks start to gather customer feedback to understand customers better, the main pain area comes in the form of the humongous data that is gathered from different sources such as the NPS (net promoter score), email, chatbot, Appstore, website, and so on. More data sources add more complexity in terms of volume and differences that each source brings to the table.

“Aggregating and preparing that massive amount of data was the most difficult challenge and certainly required the largest investment of resources,” says Michael Soistman, senior vice president of enterprise complaints data analytics and reporting at Wells Fargo. “The challenge is pulling all the data together, figuring out how to apply it so you can glean insights from it. Every channel is different, and each line of business can have differences that need to be considered.”

Yes, every channel is different. While some companies rely on NPS (Net Promoter Score), there are companies that rely on their internal feedback system or online reviews of their products.

But the question is, does one method suffice all? Can one channel depict the actual consumer behavior?

A recent University of Cambridge research paper said that “NPS measurement does not necessarily correspond to actual behavior”. The researchers propose a multi-dimensional model that incorporates behavioral and attitudinal data that is based on big data.

Allison Paine Landers, Head of Enterprise Experience Design at Prudential says,

“I like NPS…in combination with other nearer term metrics around things like effort. And, more importantly, with open ended comments, ops metrics, social media posts, Ratings & Reviews, etc.”

So it's quite evident that NPS alone will not reflect customer behavior. But when NPS scores are combined with the customer verbatim feedback, it becomes a key to making decisions that transform the customer experience.

2. Interdepartmental Alignment

Yet another challenge is to bring alignment between different key departments like customer care, marketing, and operations. As customers increasingly interact with banks using multiple channels, customer feedback rarely fits squarely within any one business unit. It almost happens in every bank that each department will focus on different data to arrive at their own conclusions.

Discussions to act always boils down to issue-level discussion as understood by different departments, completely missing the bigger picture. By integrating customer feedback into key banking processes, it becomes easy to stimulate meaningful dialogue and debate across departments.

Holly O’Neill, Chief Client Care Executive & Head of Consumer Client Services at Bank of America said her customer experience teams rely on customer experience management technologies that enable the voice of the customer programs as well as inter-department collaboration featuring multiple teams such as digital, consumer groups, and human resources.

“Our main goal and really where we’ve shifted pretty significantly over the last few years is really trying to put our 66 million clients in the middle of everything we do,” O’Neill said in an interview about her customer experience priorities and voice of the customer strategies.

Hence it becomes clear that it’s of the highest priority to identify and resolve the pain points that come with collecting and analyzing customer feedback in order to optimize the customer experience.

But the important question

How often should companies listen to their customers and research their requirements?

Is it a one-time activity that will help you to get to know what customers were thinking and what customers are going to think in the future?

Listening to your customers and taking action to solve their challenges is no doubt the first essential step to customer success. But this cannot be a one-time affair! The loop has to go on and go continue to be able to capture the ever-changing customer requirements.

This may sound daunting – but understanding your customer interactions and building a solid strategy to solve customer issues is not rocket science after all.

Let’s deep dive to analyze Continuous VoC More Strategically.

1. Continuous Tracking of Voice Of Customer Spots Changes in Customer Priorities Over Time

We are at a time when conditions are changing from day to day and even hour to hour. Traditional methods like one-time surveys can be far too long to deliver a useful perspective. Companies are resorting to continuous and faster ways to keep a pulse on consumer sentiment that changes over a period of time.

Analyzing continuous customer feedback is an important advantage for fast-growing companies to be able to quickly adjust their strategies so their stakeholders are able to make important decisions based on customer data.

For a focused effort to track customer feedback continuously, multiple departments in a company have to come together and align on the issue at hand. It is then magic happens.

When a company knows it has to improve on certain things but is not able to explain this to other departments involved, it is clear that there can be no improvements. Many times discussions to act always boils down to issue level discussion as understood by different departments, completely missing the bigger picture.

When Clootrack tried to understand the pain points, see what the customer insights team at the bank said.

“There are many aspects which we know are issues. There are some issues only some people know in the company. There are some issues which no one knows in the company. Clootrack is able to bring out these, if it matters to customers”

“We need to match rising customer expectations in the round, because what they see in one part of their lives they expect to have mirrored in another. Unless we can keep up with the highest customer expectations and the fastest movers both inside and outside of the financial services industry, we will lose out to competitors who can.” Steven Cooper, ex-CEO for Personal Banking at Barclays, whose team was overseeing the accounts of 17 million people.

For example, when Clootrack conducted a consumer experience analysis for a bank, it was astonishing to see how customer priorities were changing month on month.

The top customer priorities of the first month had changed drastically within a span of 1 month. Surprisingly the ease of UPI payments which was the second top driver in the first month was no longer a priority in the second month. Whereas in the third month a new category driver, interest rates, came suddenly out of nowhere.

Just imagine if the bank had not undertaken a continuous tracking of the voice of the customer, they would probably have worked on priorities that no longer mattered to customers.

2. Continuous Customer Feedback Brings Alignment of Stakeholders’ Decision in a Data-Driven Way

Analyzing continuous customer feedback is an important advantage for fast-growing companies to be able to quickly adjust their strategies, so their stakeholders are able to make important decisions based on customer data.

For a focused effort to track customer feedback continuously, multiple departments in a company have to come together and align on the issue at hand. It is then magic happens.

When a company knows it has to improve on certain things but is not able to explain this to other departments involved, then it is clear that there can be no improvements. Many times discussions to act always boils down to issue-level discussion as understood by different departments, completely missing the bigger picture.

See what the customer insights team at the bank said.

When the customer feedback is real and continuous, it makes everyone look at the business through the eyes of the customer and not break out into separate departments.

3. Continuous Customer Feedback Invokes Innovation

“More than 50% of product and service innovation comes from customer voice, ” says Lou Rossi, an experienced professional in strategy development.

The best-performing companies use the voice of the customer to fuel learning and innovation. Through customer feedback, customer behaviors, and data, consumers are making their desires explicit.

Companies that are ready to learn from this treasure trove of customer voice data can use it to innovate their products and services – thereby well-positioned to thrive in the years to come.

“As a large banking institution, it takes time to reinvent entrenched business models, so we focus on the customer experience when we’re thinking of ways to move the needle”, says Maria Potoroczyn, Strategy + Innovation + Ventures at Citi

For example, let’s look at the bank case study that we discussed earlier. When Clootrack presented the consumer insights based on 60,000 open-ended responses from customers every month from NPS, email, chatbot, Appstore, website, it was quite clear that the customers wanted the mobile app to be improved.

The customer feedback came out strongly as an affirmation of the doubt that existed within the Bank to improve upon their ease of mobile banking and ease of UPI payment products. When it came up as the top priority for customers, the bank didn’t waste any time and quickly flung into action to innovate and improve their ease of mobile banking and ease of UPI payment products.

“One thing I still do as a CEO is to spend 20 minutes a day reading through every support ticket. It’s an invaluable part of my day ” says Tim Hewson of USLegalWills.com. “Our support tickets are the single best source of new feature ideas, preventing revenue losses, as well as highlighting design improvements that need to be made to the user interface.”

4. Continuous Customer Feedback Tracking Allows You to Test Incremental Improvements

The key to emerging as a successful business is the ability to make rapid changes that meet or go beyond the expectations of customers. Continuous tracking of the voice of the customers allows a business to make key incremental changes quickly, and additionally test those changes in a short time span.

For example, see how the bank tracked its customer feedback continuously with the help of Clootrack to ensure that it addressed its highest customer priority on mobile banking.

In the first month ease of mobile banking came on top of all other priorities. When the Bank gave enough attention and resolved its issues, and checked the changes the next month, it was glad to see incremental improvements. Ease of Mobile banking had slid down to the 5th position from the number one position. Continuous tracking alone gives this kind of affirmation on the incremental improvements.

5. Continuous Customer Feedback Tracking Helps to Take Action in the Moment of Truth

A brand has promised something and is doing very well for a long time, but later finds that there is a gap or deficiency – this comes out as a moment of truth for the brand. This can happen only when there is continuous tracking of customer feedback.

“We have a mantra. Listen to your customers, otherwise, you will have none ” says Zach Hendrix, Co-Founder of GreenPal.