Customer experience (CX) is not about technology, it is about rich customer relationships, Pat McDermott from Bank of Ireland tells ThinkBusiness.
Bank of Ireland was a recent winner of the CX Impact in Financial Services for the second year in a row at the recent CX Impact Awards.
Not only that but the team led by Pat McDermott, head of Data & Digital with Bank of Ireland Global Markets’ Treasury division, also won the overall CX Champions Category.
“Our decisions can only be as good as our data so having customer facing colleagues and a data specialist working together to deliver verifiable and factual insights allows to transfer the information gleaned into actionable change and initiatives”
We spoke to McDermott about why CX is at the heart of business development and relationship building for big brands such as Bank of Ireland.
Customer experience (CX) is about more than technology, would it be fair to describe it as a cultural shift for an organisation like Bank of Ireland?
Technology and digital enhancements to services and offerings are only ways in which we can enrich customer experience (CX). CX as a whole is much more than technology, it’s about knowing your customer and tapping into an emotional connection with them based on your understanding.
To meet your customer at this level, it requires you to shift away from a transactional mindset and embrace a relational approach.
The transition alone requires significant cultural change and support from within your organisation, from top to bottom. For this transition to flourish your organisation needs to not only curate but live by values and a strategy that put the customer at the centre of everything we do. Fortunately for Bank of Ireland, we have been living our customer centric values for years and this operating model is the norm for us.
What does winning the CX Champion and CX Impact Award mean for the Global Markets team at the bank?
Firstly, we feel the awards are a testament to our devotion to a customer centric culture and the success of the culture we have implemented. It’s very important to us to allow our customers to dictate the flow and direction of our business and agree that ultimately our service should be reflective of their needs.
“It is very important that colleagues acknowledge that CX is a business model not a project, we can’t dip in and out of it as we please, it requires consistent dedication”
Secondly, winning these awards has brought immense pride to our team. It instils confidence that our strategic approach in delivering for our customers is the right one. This win also celebrates the team’s duality, not only are they Foreign Exchange Specialists but relationship managers who are adept with assessing customer needs. Additionally, this win showcases how the combination of technology and human engagements go hand in hand, it’s mutually beneficial operating model.
Regardless of winning, the application process alone was a great learning opportunity. Sitting down to evaluate all we do provided us with an updated, holistic overview of how we serve our customers. When on paper, it was abundantly clear what both our gain and pain points are, highlighting new avenues to enhance the customers overall experience. It served as an important reminder to avoid stagnancy and to keep growing and moving in line with our customers changing wants and needs.
What steps were involved in the FXPay journey to create a product that embraced digitalisation but at the same time ensured that the levels of human interaction that customers crave were enshrined in the offering?
As previously mentioned, our customers drive the direction of our business so, ensuring we hear, acknowledge and activate the customers perspective is of the utmost importance. We capture this in a series of ways:
- Customer surveys
- Customer journey mapping
- Touch base calls
- Naturally via in person meetings, service calls etc
- Digital communication methods
- Digital transformation and analytics
We are major advocates for the importance of real people, real insights in real time. Our hybrid operating model of technology mixed with real people facilitates this perfectly. The implementation of a Digital Analyst into the team has been invaluable and certainly transformed the fluidity and accessibility of our data.
Our decisions can only be as good as our data so having customer facing colleagues and a data specialist working together to deliver verifiable and factual insights allows to transfer the information gleaned into actionable change and initiatives. We have seen our segmentation capabilities expand which is incredibly important as today’s customer expects a personalised approach and experience at every single touch point.
Last year we looked at the 6 pillars of CX excellence. How do you ensure that a CX ethos can be entrenched in the business model of a bank and do you see your methodology being adopted by other divisions of Bank of Ireland?
As an organisation you need to view CX as a relay race, we all own it and are therefore, all responsible for it. Only through consistent collaboration with each other and the wider group can we foster a customer obsessed culture, that places the customer at the centre of everything we do.
It is very important that colleagues acknowledge that CX is a business model not a project, we can’t dip in and out of it as we please, it requires consistent dedication. At Bank of Ireland, we can see through the creation of the Chief Customer Officer role, that the Group are cognisant of the importance of this vocation. To further support our customer mission and the embedding of this culture, teams who are CX custodians have been set up.
These teams are constantly assessing customer analysis and trends and liaising with those best placed to drive CX enhancing change and initiatives. These teams are localised and serve as visible reminders of our values of Customer First and Stronger Relationships. Additionally, they run ongoing training in this space to reinforce that customer centric mindset for every colleague.
