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Customers are increasingly prioritizing the entire experience of a product over features and prices. Eduardo Roma, a partner with Bain's Financial Services practice, discusses four things banks are doing to ensure that customer episodes are simple, intuitive and delivered with a human touch.
Read the Bain Brief: Running the Business through Your Customer's Eyes
Read the transcript below.
EDUARDO ROMA: Customers in banking are increasingly looking well beyond the product features and the product price, and they increasingly really care about the overall experience. So they care about the ease of access, they care about the convenience, they care about the simplicity.
What banks are now starting to do is to define a new unit of management, which is what we call the episode. The episode starts when a customer need is expressed, and it only finishes, actually, through a series of interactions when that need is satisfied. So, for example, applying and setting up for a new home loan.
So what makes a compelling episode? A compelling episode is an episode that is simple, that is intuitive, that is delivered through a very simple process, that is enabled by very fit-for-purpose technology. But actually, most importantly, they are delivered with a human touch.
So what are the banks doing to continuously design and fix episodes? Well, number one is that they are getting clarity on what is the overall set of experiences that are defined in a retail bank, defining the experiences but also having a clear view on what are the most important ones for the customer.
Number two, the banks are defining very clear target outcomes for those episodes: not only customer metrics, but operational metrics as well. Number three, banks are also setting clear accountability organizationally for who owns those episodes for fixes, design and maintenance.
And then, number four, banks are standing up Agile teams that work cross-functionally, bringing together people from the business, from support and control functions, from IT and operations, to not only deliver the experience for the customer, but also the supporting technology and processes behind it.
So by following these steps, banks can not only deliver a great customer experience, but they can also do it in a much lower-cost way.
Read the Bain Brief: Running the Business through Your Customer's Eyes
Published in June 2017