An Omnichannel Redesign Helps Transform a Bank’s Customer Experience

A major retail bank set out to improve the customer experience (CX), a goal that had eluded the bank in past efforts because of a complex interaction model that included branches, online services, and call centers—as well as a variety of products and business units.

We helped BankCo* transform its CX by implementing a multiyear program that broke down management silos; rethought customer journeys from every angle (especially the customer’s); and built out the essential technological, operational, and organizational muscles BankCo now uses to better serve its customers.

Customer journeys as a series of episodes

Excellence in omnichannel banking means offering each customer the right channel at the right time for their specific objective. Getting a loan, opening an account—these examples of customer journeys are composed of discrete episodes that can occur online, in person, through a call center, or some mix of all three. Leading banks know how to nudge customers to the channel (particularly digital channels) that will serve customers well at the right cost.

Working with BankCo to identify some of the most important customer journeys, we examined the role each channel played in each episode in each journey. This revealed a host of interdependencies—that is, episodes in which customer satisfaction depended on the seamless interaction of multiple parts of BankCo’s operations.

BankCo then defined a series of omnichannel customer episodes that most urgently needed redesign. For each of these top-priority episodes, we drew insights from customer data and interviews, pinpointing the obstacles to customer satisfaction and mapping the interrelated capabilities involved.

We assessed the maturity of 80 capabilities at BankCo, identifying where they could be applied across multiple journeys by developing them in an “as a service” model.

Priorities defined; solutions cocreated

With BankCo’s leaders aligned on a mission to improve top-priority episodes across the company, the focus shifted to how to support the necessary changes and how to track improvements over time.

To do that, we deployed NPS Prism^®, which tracks CX scores at the episode level; benchmarks and other data would allow BankCo to compare itself to other companies on the specific interactions that shape customer satisfaction.

In a series of workshops, BankCo helped employees from every department (some meeting for the first time) better understand exactly how they relied on each other. These sessions identified the missing elements for a successful transformation—the building blocks necessary across BankCo’s digital channels, contact centers, marketing technology, and IT foundations.

Some episodes were relatively easy to improve because they’re only loosely linked to core operations. From the beginning, we alerted BankCo to these “apples on the ground”—that is, small changes that can improve CX in the near term. Other initiatives were more complicated, requiring breaking up a monolithic part of the organization or shifting processes in a synchronized way across business units and departments.

Our multidisciplinary team sequenced all of these changes into a single roadmap for a three-year transformation journey. The plan offered end-to-end solutions to improve the customer experience, as well as clarity on the bottom-up costs of each initiative, accounting for capacity constraints and investments in enterprise technology required to make the program successful.

BankCo’s ongoing transformation

BankCo went forward with the transformation, beginning with a pilot redesign of customer onboarding episodes. After that pilot proved successful, BankCo committed to a full-scale CX transformation. Its leaders have rallied business units, channel leaders, and technology stakeholders around a unified set of CX priorities that are rooted in episodes and reflected in each unit’s plan. This CX transformation is foundational to the bank’s customer strategy, and an important enabler of a bank-wide efficiency program. 

*We take our clients' confidentiality seriously. While we've changed their names, the results are real.