Experience Banker

Earlier this year ExperienceBanker talked to customer experience expert Jin Zwicky, VP of customer experience at OCBC –  the 2nd largest bank in south-east Asia.

Coming from a design and engineering background, Jin stands for the development of elegant business solutions through action – listening to customers, prototyping, testing, refining – rather than assumptions. And Jin boasts quite a pedigree in customer experience and banking, before OCBC she was in charge of customer experience strategy at Credit Suisse Private Bank in Zurich.

In this interview with ExB’s Rob Ballantine, Jin provides her perspectives on customer experience in business strategy, the role of design, listening to customers …..and what banks can learn from dentists.

ExB -  Let’s start with the basics. Define customer experience?

JZ – Every company has a different understanding of customer experience. For some companies, CX means working out customer behaviour from data like the transactional behavior of customer segments.  But for me it’s simple. Customer experience is every interaction between the bank and the customer.  In my field of private banking, the most important part of the experience is the people, but the rest is too often neglected: the website, the physical space, the phone calls, the paper makes up the experience.  These touchpoints are best measured by our customers emotional and rational judgement of how good it is.

ExB – I understand why banks would want a hard measurement, but why are emotions and judgement so important?

JZ -  Because it’s something we can’t control. Why do you like certain brands?  Whether you like a brand or not, can’t be forced by a company.  In banking, like all industries, customers have choices and there are competitors out there that offer similar services and advice, so experience is one the key elements that we need to differentiate on more.

ExB -  So customer experience helps strengthen brands but how should it interplay with the creation of the brand?

JZ – Good experiences are designed based on customers’ needs and expectations, based on the business goals, and based on our brand strategy.  But I believe customer experience is the way we deliver the brand.  At Credit Suisse the brand value was “helping clients thrive”. That means helping customers to understand our services, and making customers’ interactions easier therefore making confident decision to grow their wealth.

ExB – You mentioned critical touch points, tell me what you mean by this?

JZ – Critical touch points are for me something that customers interact with most frequently or something they rely on to make a decision. So statements are something that every customer gets. Or product fact-sheets, which are the first touch points that customers see when deciding on investments. Online banking, customers experience on  a daily basis. For me its about frequency and relevance of interaction that makes a critical touch point.

ExB – How do you find out what customer needs are of a touch point?

JZ – I use a method called experience labs when working in a specific touchpoint.  These are in-depth discussions with customers. I find out needs that were not identified in surveys or quantitative data.

ExB – The famous experience labs. How do they work?

JZ -  Experience labs are about 2 things: firstly, finding out how customers feel about the bank and second letting our business stakeholders have empathy towards customers through observation.  It’s a one on one conversation with customers but normally we have something to show them or something to interact with.  It’s similar to a usability test but it can be applied to online touchpoints such as paper or even processes.  Another difference from usability tests is that we don’t prescribe tasks beforehand. It’s a customer driven discussion.  I want to understand how they use our touchpoints in a natural situation.  But it’s not only about listening, it’s also about observing non verbal behavior like facial expressions. Which is why its important to have the key stakeholders including senior executives responsible for the touchpoint observing live.

ExB – You have executives observing during your research?

JZ – A critical element of experience labs is having the observation room and then having a discussion after each interview to develop a collective insight.  It’s not only researchers’ findings, but collective findings of project stakeholders from all fields like legal, operations, marketing and IT. This collective insight became invaluable source to make important decisions whether strategic or operational.

ExB – What effect does it have on your stakeholders?

JZ – Once they are in the room, they really enjoy it, its entertaining and they learn so much because  its interactive. They have to listen, and importantly discuss what they’ve heard.  I get a lot of project referrals from colleagues who have attended labs – they say “its cool, you have to go”. It creates a buzz and creates returning internal business for us. In companies like OCBC or Credit Suisse, or any bank for that matter, it’s quite a unique decision-making experience.

ExB – When you finished your labs for a project, how do you turn those findings into improvements? What techniques do you use to go from insight into design.

JZ – This is at the core of customer experience.  We can turn qualitative insights into actionable concepts or design solutions or prototypes. Once you know what’s important it’s often about getting the basics right. For information channels like web or print that means highlighting the most important information or creating a structure that makes the most relevant information the most accessible for customers.  I share the collective findings in a report or as a story that contains tangible recommendations at all levels from strategy down to tangible improvements.  And then as a project we start to sketch out, visually putting ideas together, we visualize to think.  there is no formal design process, we start out sketching ideas then iterate, iterate, iterate.

ExB – So the people in your team need to be designers as well as researchers?

JZ – When I first joined Credit Suisse, I knew little about research methods, I was a designer first.  Research is my greatest learning in this job.  But for me it’s about team composition. And having a mix of backgrounds that helps to come up with rich solution and trying to learning from each other.

ExB – What are the ingredients of a great CX professional?

JZ – First empathy. Second passion.  You need to be able to understand then be passionate for change. Another part is design – and by that I mean the ability to judge good design or bad design, especially when you work with creative agencies and consultancies.  This includes information design and functional designs.  Another part is being a big picture thinker, experiences don’t exist in silos, a customer who does online banking also receives a bill – we provide experiences in a multi channel environments, so being able to think in with multi channel perspectives and being able to explain it as the big picture is critical.

ExB – Does a business need to have a customer experience strategy?

JZ – I believe, yes we need to have the concept of CX in senior managers heads and to have it widely communicated in a simple format that is understandable by all functions of organizations. For example, at OCBC the four values of customer experience are ‘Simple’, ‘Fast’, ‘Friendly’ and ‘Useful’. But this not enough, we need to translate what these values mean to this particular interaction.  For example when it comes to mobile banking, being ‘friendly’ means humanizing the technology- using terms users understand, providing specific message that users need to know.  The rest values will be also translated specific to mobile banking to be tangible and workable.

ExB – What obstacles do you encounter that get in the way of doing good CX work?

JZ- First one is regulatory requirements. As a bank I believe that transparency and simplicity will drive more and more change. Customers want to be empowered, they want to understand more, they want banks to make their life easier.  But at the same time regulatory pressure is getting higher and higher. Recently I have been working on our investment products brochure, and I am faced by legal telling me  -” we must put it in there, this is a new regulation” . I fully understand banks’ legal responsibility.  But I do believe there are creative ways to meet regulatory requirements and customers’ needs. The solution was enabled through having the legal stakeholder in the observer room and collaborating with them closely during prototyping process.

Second, the organization of a bank itself can be an obstacle due to the way it is structured.  Banks are structured in own logic which unlike a customers view of the bank. Therefore often the big picture of how customers interact with us may not be shared by different part of organizations, making it a challenge to create cross-divisional teams that really work.

ExB – What companies do you admire that do great CX?

JZ – Everyone usually says Apple, (who I do admire) but I say, my last dentist – Swiss Smile.

ExB – Pardon, your dentist?

JZ – Yeah, they were founded by two beautiful female dentists.  What I like is they have a great waiting room concept.  It’s like a hotel lounge.  Their brand pervades throughout, which for a dentist is unique.  And they open all year round, until 8pm(which is very rare in Switzerland)  in the most convenient places.  Normally in Switzerland when you go to the dentist, you need an appointment and they shut at 6.30, but Swiss Smile are super convenient.  They’re different.  They even have own branded products like tooth paste and dental floss. And the experience  is great, and I got nicer teeth.

ExB: If you could give one piece of advice to a banks CEO on how to improve customer experience, what would it be?  If you were in the elevator with a CEO from a bank what would you say?

JZ:  I love Marty Neumeier’s Designful Company. I would recommend this book! And the greatest thing I got out of this book is this.  (Sketching…)

d+d = : D

Something DIFFERENT and great DESIGN = Delighted Customers

He will remember it.

Jin Zwicky is currently Vice President  of Customer Experience  at OCBC bank in Singapore.