From Laggard to Leader: Desjardins Evolves Member Centricity for the Digital Age

A diversified financial institution with a 125-year legacy, Desjardins stands out among Canadian banks in two key ways: It’s the leading Francophone financial institution in Quebec, and it’s member-owned, which allows it to house banking and insurance under one roof.

But those advantages didn’t guarantee enduring relationships with its customers. Facing a lagging Net Promoter Score (NPS®), the loss of 80,000 members in five years, and competition from digital-forward banks, Desjardins approached us with two pivotal questions: Who are we going to be, and how are we going to compete?

Our answer: By embracing digital innovation and reigniting its member-focused mission, Desjardins could deepen existing member relationships, expand to new audiences, and secure its standing as a market leader in customer service.

How we helped

Over the next seven years, we worked with the organization to reverse its trajectory. Our north star was an enterprise-wide NPS assessment, which allowed us to capture customers’ pain points and priorities and convey them to the company’s front and back lines.

We then turned our attention to shaping an omnichannel strategy that clarified the role of digital and human channels. Finally, we deepened conversations about technological delivery and worked to modernize core systems at scale.

Our collaborative process was guided by four pillars:

1. Listen closely to members—and understand what informs their experience. Desjardins drove a cultural shift toward member centricity by establishing a common language and moving from an abstract concept to measurable outcomes and a single feedback management system. Key to this “customer listening” pillar was implementing the Net Promoter System^TM across the entire organization. We treated customer feedback as an organizational responsibility vs. simply a frontline concern—and used the insights we collected to hone the target value proposition and surface strategic priorities.
   
   
2. Meet members where they are. Building on the NPS revitalization, we had a simple goal: Understand how members want to be engaged—and then redesign both human and digital channels accordingly. We did this by establishing a Journey Design Center—a centralized center of excellence that combined customer analytics, human-centered design capabilities, digital experts, and technology and operations expertise to reimagine experiences across channels. This enabled Desjardins to go beyond incremental enhancements to a more fundamental reimagination of the customer journey.
   Desjardins demonstrated its commitment as an experience-focused organization by modernizing, consolidating, and scaling its technology ecosystem; streamlining web and mobile experiences; and empowering its front line to deliver exceptional experiences in critical moments of truth.
   
   
3. Simplify the value proposition and product portfolio. A core focus was redirecting scarce resources and capacity toward deepening customer relationships. In keeping with this, the company turned its attention from the products and services that weren’t core to its Québécois membership, focusing dollars on omnichannel experience and loyalty. This not only served the company mission but ultimately increased efficiency in distribution networks and reduced expenses by more than 10% in four years.
   
   
4. Embed (and embrace) new ways of working. Desjardins knew that its investment in customer experience was only as good as the people providing it. The company evolved its ways of working by breaking down organizational siloes and building the muscles needed to work collaboratively and agilely across functions. It established coordinated KPIs across products, technology, and operations, and stood up governance mechanisms to maintain enterprise-wide coordination on core investments.

Blueprint for success

Delivering on a new mission meant widening the aperture—from tackling one-off improvements to treating member centricity as how business is done. Clear, consistent support from senior leadership and a pervasive focus on “customer listening” drove momentum. Then, success came down to connecting the dots between members’ feedback and the back-end systems and processes needed to make an improved experience a reality.

“Today, the vast majority of our interactions with members and clients occur online, especially on their mobile, and our online experience is a major driver of members’ loyalty,” said Nathalie Larue, executive vice president, Personal Services, at Desjardins. “This is what we mean by ‘meeting our members where they are.’”

As with any transformation, change management helped Desjardins stick the landing. “I’m ultimately managing a human transformation,” says Mathieu Staniulis, vice president of Products, Solutions, and Digital Platforms and chief transformation officer. “It was a pivotal moment when [we] realized our KPIs were not moving, and our transformation was not achieving its goals. We had to work harder to get our people on board with the changes being made.”

Results—and what’s next

Transforming to a member-centric, omnichannel organization helped Desjardins achieve a groundswell of tangible wins. After its steep drop in membership, the company reversed course over the next five years, growing its membership by 140,000 customers. Sales initiated online grew from 25% to roughly 40% in four years, putting Desjardins ahead of competition in Canada by approximately 10 percentage points.

NPS soared 11 points, as measured via NPS Prism^TM, the market standard CX benchmarking platform. Additionally, the company saw bottom-line benefits—to the tune of 10% revenue growth in one year. Most crucially, 96% of Desjardins employees understood member centricity as a core component of the organization’s strategy.

The journey to a digitally enabled future isn’t over. The company plans to further strengthen member relationships and redefine what customer intimacy means in the digital era by tapping into advanced data, analytics, and generative AI capabilities to give their members and clients the support they need to be financially empowered

At the outset of our partnership, Desjardins wanted to avoid being “just another bank.” By making good on its goal to be the “#1 choice for members and clients,” it far exceeded that goal—with room to grow in an increasingly digital era.

About Desjardins

Desjardins Group is the largest cooperative financial group in North America and the sixth largest cooperative financial group in the world, with assets of $464.7 billion and 7.7 million members and clients. With business entities and units offering a full range of financial and insurance services, Desjardins is a pioneer and leader in online and mobile banking services in Canada. As a cooperative financial group contributing to the development of communities, Desjardins's mission is to provide its members and clients with the support they need to be financially empowered.