Creating an Exceptional Experience with a 360° View of the Customer
April 29, 2021
Event Highlights
Traditional banks must move swiftly to create the seamless, personalized experiences that customers and employees demand. This requires breaking down organizational silos and creating agile ways of working. This redesign must happen in the back, middle and front office, with automated end-to-end processes and AI-powered insights enabling exceptional customer experiences. Building a service ecosystem, powered by the predictive capabilities of AI, allows banks to anticipate and exceed customer needs.
This virtual roundtable convened business executives and experts from leading financial institutions to share how they are accelerating their digital transformations, digitizing end-to-end core banking processes and using technology to create exceptional customer experiences. The discussion included how operations and culture are changed with digital innovations.
PARTICIPANTS
Raffaelle Breaks, SVP, Enterprise Digital Member Experiences, American Express Membership
Kate Danella, SEVP, Chief Strategy and Client Experience Officer, Regions Bank
Rizwan Khalfan, EVP, Digital and Payments Officer, TD Bank Group
Nathalie Larue, EVP, Strategy, Marketing and Personal Services, Desjardins
Grace Lee, SVP & Chief Analytics Officer, Scotiabank
Alarice Lonergan, Partner, Financial Services Enterprise Strategy & iX NA Market Leader, IBM
Jason Strle, Chief Information Officer, Consumer and Small Business Banking, Wells Fargo
Michael Tae, Corporate Vice President, Chief Transformation Officer, Investor Communications Solutions, Broadridge
Rami Thabet, VP Digital Product, RBC
Moderator: Alison Williams, Senior Analyst, Global Banks & Asset Managers, Bloomberg Intelligence Research
Click here to view the video of the full discussion.
Here’s what they had to say: Participants shared that implementing new technologies such as AI allowed them to personalize services in ways not previously possible. Grace Lee, SVP & Chief Analytics Officer, Scotiabank describes the impact of AI on customer relationships, “And when I think about serving a wonderful experience to all those millions of customers at the same time, AI is the only answer. AI allows us to have the scale benefit of automation without compromising on the value of personalization, customization and empathy. In fact, it almost enhances that.”
Institutions that have been using AI for a while continue to find new uses for its power of automation. Raffaelle Breaks, SVP, Enterprise Digital Member Experiences, American Express Membership shared, “We’ve been using machine learning and AI in our experiences for a while but really, most recently just thinking about how we use it to better personalize the experience. We’ve had a lot of success most recently with our Amex offers product, so giving our customers, savings when they’re spending and making that available through our mobile app, our website, and most recently we’ve tripled engagement with Amex offers and that’s through making sure that they’re really personalized and targeted and take to account our customer’s spending habits as well.” Rami Thabet, VP Digital Product, RBC shared, “What we’re really incredibly excited about is the promise of AI and data around intent prediction. And as these client groups move their behavior with us, as financial institutions and organizations, we’re really beginning to become quite advanced at our ability to predict intent and get them in the most convenient spot and move our capabilities forward, to really resolving intent in the fastest, most expedient and greatest client experience manner possible and really move that interaction from a touchpoint to an absolute delight moment.”
Participants shared that they are seeing a very high adoption rate in the utilization of digital channels. Customers now have new expectations as they become used to working in a digital environment. Rizwan Khalfan, EVP, Digital and Payments Officer, TD Bank Group shared, “More and more we start to see that those customers with a high level of fluency from a digital perspective are looking for insights and advice. And that’s where personalization at scale comes into play. We need to be able to look at the data that we have with our customers, then apply an intelligence layer that would include AI as it was referenced before, but it also could include decision engines and traditional rules engines where you are now assessing the needs of these customers and in working the capabilities, to best meet their needs. I think, from a personalization perspective to evolve the customer experience, we’ll have to look at the preferences of each of our customers and take that into account before we invoke this capability into an experience.”
Kate Danella, SEVP, Chief Strategy and Client Experience Officer, Regions Bank, spoke about the importance of partnering with the customer and providing transparency on the use of data so that customers are empowered. “Couldn’t agree with the panelists more around omni-channel experiences and making those experiences seamless. An enabler to that is allowing the customer to have control, have understanding of the information that we share with one another, the customer with the bank and the bank with the customer, and making that as transparent and accessible as possible, so that the customer can direct her journey through our various channels and experiences and help in that customization process.”
Jason Strle, Chief Information Officer, Consumer and Small Business Banking, Wells Fargo noted that data collection is essential to creating a great customer experience and added, “But it’s incredibly important to have a robust feedback loop that you can quickly incorporate into those customer journeys that you’re trying to create. So that’s been a big part of our focus at Wells Fargo is as those customers are interacting with us and we’ve got this rich amount of data that we we understand about, how they’re using it, how easy it is to use the functionality that we have for them, whether they’re becoming frustrated or they have questions or concerns. We can bake all that into a quick feedback loop that then goes into the enhancement process to make that experience even better.”
All institutions have changed operations in some way as they move to digitize their operations. Participants discussed the changes they have made to the way they work. Breaks described American Express’ new working style “We’ve done a lot to organize ourselves into what we lovingly refer to as “squads” made up of our designers, our product managers, our engineers, our data scientists, our analytics, team members. And by organizing, we’re creating cohesion within that team focused on the greater good of the customer experience.”
Alarice Lonergan, Partner, Financial Services Enterprise Strategy & iX NA Market Leader, IBM noticed from her perspective that financial institutions are organizing themselves differently, “I love the conversation we’re having today and the fact that so many of you have focused on just changing the way in which you’re working with clients within your teams. It’s just putting the client in your case at the center of everything you do, and we saw a lot of that in terms of how we were working with many of you from IBM and many of you as clients of our, too in terms of deploying lots of agile ways of working and doing it at scale.”
Michael Tae, Corporate Vice President, Chief Transformation Officer, Investor Communications Solutions, Broadridge pointed out that infrastructure is the foundation of these new work systems, “And so just as we think about the processes and the culture and the way we have worked, there’s the underlying infrastructure that has allowed all this to happen. And so for us, helping that transition, accelerating that process and utilizing the cloud in a much more accelerated fashion, has really helped us and enabled us to help drive better outcomes for our clients, certainly utilizing data, leveraging that data and utilizing AI to get there. But that’s been a big part as well, which is the underlying infrastructure that helps support all the processes and changes that we’re talking about.”
Nathalie Larue, EVP, Strategy, Marketing and Personal Services, Desjardins discussed the importance of having a common customer-centric culture to pull everything together, “What I’ve seen that has really helped in our organization is the call from the top with our president calling us and having one culture and one culture being the customer centric culture. And yes agile is there to support it and yes, AI is there to support it, and all the key capacities and ways of organizing is there to help the customer culture. The question that we have to ask ourselves is “How do we bring back the voice of the customer in all the work that we’re doing?” Because these agile squads that we put together, essentially they come from technical backgrounds, from marketing backgrounds, from manufacturing, and the product background. But what really relates them?… Yes, bringing the right advice to the customer at the right time, but at the same time is for our people to understand what they can take, what liberty they can take, to bring a really good member experience and client experience.”
This Bloomberg Roundtable was Proudly Sponsored By
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