Jim's Journal

Interesting article in the September issue of the Harvard Business Review: The Truth About Customer Experience by Alex Rawson, Ewan Duncan, and Conor Jones.  The focus of the article to me is about how we have often focused on individual customer interactions but fail to look at the end-to-end “journey” associated with the customer experience.  This impacts both the customer and the employees making for better long term results, brings the organization together and allows for an effective cohesion of top-down and bottom-up input and insights.

I thought about how this would apply to banking – specifically the bank and credit union transformation taking place as a result of the digital banking revolution. So many financial institutions focus on improving channels and touch points. The reality is that the transformation needs to be a part of the entire customer or member experience. In a recent conversation with a credit union CEO, he had a dramatic realization: “I need to think differently about the types of people I’m hiring, not bankers and call center agent but technologists.” Only from his vantage point could this be possible, the call center manager complains about their people having to deal with browser issues. The branch manager feels they are wasting time with customer questions about online banking. But if they just step back and think about it – that is banking today.

I believe there should be more research on how people use technology end-to-end in banking.  Its clear that technology is changing the workflow of banking activities. Old measure: On a call or in the branch when opening an account the agent assumes they are the face of the financial institution, but in reality the customer now attributes satisfaction to the various processes. For example: the device they used to get alerts, or the way they pay a bill or transfer money. The next choice may be a different: an ATM or even PayPal. What they reach for to pay, how they consider a purchase.  Banks are organized around old journeys and measure success on individual transactions – sure many are looking at relationships but that’s mostly around product focus.

Digging into the entire journey and data behind it uncovers problems that might otherwise be misdiagnosed.  For example: poor quality assurance on new online account applications leading to bad configurations could create false association with online banking. Better incentives to the application process, or better yet redesigning or rethinking the workflow would only be discovered from an overall journey review. Think of the problems and challenges of book buying and how Amazon solved them. The shift to journey orientation and reconsidering traditional journeys rather than applying technology to them is critical.  Consider the idea of an iPad application creating bankers as individual branches or deploying custom applications on their iPhone that essentially connects them to the bank and their personal banker.

What ideas do you have?

Executive Summary:

Companies have long emphasized touchpoints—the many critical moments when customers interact with the organization on their way to purchase and after. But this focus can create a distorted picture, suggesting that customers are happier with the company than they actually are. And it distracts from the more important picture: the customer’s end-to-end experience.

In their research, the authors—partners at McKinsey—have found that organizations able to skillfully manage the entire customer journey reap enormous benefits: enhanced customer satisfaction, reduced churn, increased revenue, and greater employee satisfaction.

To realize these benefits, companies need to embed customer journeys into their operating models in four ways. They must identify key journeys, understand how they are performing in each, redesign and support those journeys, and change mind-sets to sustain the initiatives at scale.

Journey-based transformations may take years to perfect. But they create a culture that engages the organization across functions and from top to bottom. It’s a culture that’s hard to build otherwise, and a true competitive advantage goes to companies that get it right.