EMS2 -putting the customer in the heart of the organisation

As banking, insurance and superannuation customers are spreading their engagements with chosen providers over the various channel offerings, financial services organisations in turn have sought align their core values with customer needs to provide truly customer-centric service. FST Media and EMC hosted a panel discussion with industry leaders across technology, marketing and customer focus to discuss predictive analytics, providing a single view of the customer, channel development and internal practices.

Mark Jones, ConferenCe ChairMan: In the industry today we speak a lot about the customer experience. This topic assumes that channel-

agnosticism is the path to a better customer experience and I really want to tease that out. There is a sense that we are quite fond of a particular channel and, according to the theory of this question, that is not allowed. I am going to ask you first, Kate. I would like to know: are you, in fact, a true channel agnostic or do you have a religious bent one way or the other as far as channels are concerned?

kate kerr, MetLife: When we look at how customers interact within each channel, whereas before it has been largely dictated by organisations, these days it is about understanding the customer. At MetLife we know that customers, although

Kate Kerr, Head of Marketing, Communications & Client Experience, MetLife; Chris Kenny, Head of Marketing, ING Direct; Linda Broady, Head of Customer Focus, Allianz Australia; Anna-Maree Shaw, Head of Group Customer Marketing, Suncorp; Danny Malone, Executive, New Technologies, RACQ; Mani Raman, Sales & Alliances Manager, EMC APJ.

Financial Services Technology Media

where the market meets

Putting the Customer at the Heart of the Organisation – the Roadmap to Channel Agnosticism8th Annual Technology & Innovation – the Future of Banking & Financial Services Conference, Sydney 7 + 8 November 2013

Putting the CustoMer at the heart of the organisation – the roadMaP to ChanneL agnostiCisM

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they have a preferred channel, do like to move across channels at different times for different interactions and also through life stages. We get people swapping channels and having different preferences according to the product. I think the most important thing is ensuring you understand your customers.

Mark Jones, ConferenCe ChairMan: Linda, what are your thoughts on that?

Linda Broady, aLLianz austraLia: I am not sure I like the term “agnostic” when it comes to channels, because that suggests to me that it is an impersonal experience – or it is lacking in personality – and it is really important that you understand what experience you are trying to deliver. If you understand what you are trying to stand for as a brand and how that expresses in terms of emotional and rational interactions for the customer, then you try and draw a consistency across your channels in terms of how you express that. It can be letters, your online experience, your phone experience and so on. You do get customers jumping from one channel to the next – we will get customers who do their research to get quotes on insurance online, but when it comes to making the purchase, they are happier to transition to discuss their quote with a consultant.

Mark Jones, ConferenCe ChairMan: Anna-Maree, I want to jump to you because there is an interesting tension here. There is the idealism that customers happily float from one channel to another and then there is the business that says, “Yes, but this channel over here is really quite lucrative.”

anna-Marie shaw, sunCorP: It comes down to organisational maturity in terms of whether the organisation is big enough to say “It is okay that they are moving across channels – let’s make this a soft process of coming from online to offline and ask if there is anything we can do to enable that experience.” Those traditional silos are starting to break down. I am seeing change happen where we are removing the silos – the marketing, the distribution – and saying “Let’s have our budget by channel. Let’s move that budget to what the customer needs.” That is a big step forward.

danny MaLone, raCQ: The agnostic part potentially comes back to the technology and the actual delivery through those channels. You guys are very concerned with the end user experience that the customer is receiving through a particular channel and so you should be. For us technologists though we need to be able to deliver across all of those channels for you guys with technology that is agnostic of the channel.

Chris kenny, ing direCt: We have noticed that analysis of our Net Promoter Score [NPS] has revealed that channel-switching is actually quite disruptive for [customers]. I can understand in industries like telecommunications or insurance it would be appropriate. With us, we have a pretty simple business model. If it is an online savings account or an everyday transaction account, we would like that ‘one and done’ experience and we constantly work to simplify the process so it is intuitive [for customers] to get through it in one go.

Mark Jones, ConferenCe ChairMan: Mani, how do you manage that and keep it efficient?

Mani raMan, eMC aPJ: The channel experience is more than just what we are providing to our clients. It is also about providing the ability to take in the information that customers are sending back, and being able to process that. It is not a one-way communication. Communication means that we also have to listen to what is coming back and be able to make decisions around that. It is not just an isolated process, rather a more holistic experience inside our organisation so that we can deliver that customer experience.

Mark Jones, ConferenCe ChairMan: What is the split of the different channels in terms of customer usage?

kate kerr, MetLife: We developed an online insurance application. It was incredibly difficult to take 350 questions out of an application process and to remove over seventy forms and questionnaires and provide an online experience that people wanted to use. We have seen the shift from paper applications to online applications of up to eighty per cent because people can get a decision in eight minutes. That is phenomenal progress, and once people catch on to that the word spreads and that builds the dedication for customers to those channels.

Chris kenny, ing direCt: Our colleagues yesterday were sharing that mobile is now surpassing online in terms of banking, and that is true, but what we have yet to solve is how to truly interact on the mobile device. It is something that I would like to do in concert with customers – maybe get some beta testing, get a customer panel up, some useability, and figure out how people would like to open accounts or do things that are rather unorthodox today because we can all pay a bill or transfer money. The question for us, the one that we are challenged with, is how to take that to the next level, not only in terms of what you can do on there but decreasing the number of steps. If I log in and I need to transfer money, that is currently going to take me

“Communication … is not just an isolated process, rather a more holistic experience inside our organisation so that we can deliver that customer experience.”– Mani Raman, EMC

“We have yet to solve is how to interact truly on the mobile device. It is something that I would like to do in concert with customers.”– Chris Kenny, ING Direct


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about five steps. If you look at Amazon you can look for inspiration in getting that down to maybe one or two.

anna-Maree shaw, sunCorP: We are opening about twenty per cent of our accounts online within the banking area and a lot of our service aspects are also online. Our claims experience with our claims app, and other processes, are really easy to follow online.

Mark Jones, ConferenCe ChairMan: And you are managing the split between online and when they jump from a form to the call centre? Can you connect those?

anna-Maree shaw, sunCorP: The focus is to simplify. It is rationalising your product systems, simplifying the processes around that and then optimising the touch points and bringing them closer together.

danny MaLone, raCQ: Information flow and integration is very important from a technology perspective to help deliver the customer experience. It is also about driving beyond basic integration and looking at the customer experience and what you are doing with that information.

Mani raMan, eMC aPJ: We are talking about channel agnosticism, which is fine from a marketing point of view, which looks at customer acquisition. Once you get to that point, how does that link to getting the customers on board easily? It is one thing to get their attention. Closing that to the point where they have executed that contract and become your customer is another thing.

anna-Maree shaw, sunCorP: It is an end-to-end lead generation process. You have to be focused on how you are capturing that lead, how you are managing it, and then through what channels you should fulfil. If you are not keeping an eye on the end-to-end process, it is going to fall over.

Mani raMan, eMC aPJ: Do you have responsibility for that end-to-end process or does it require working with other stakeholders and product managers across the organisation?

anna-Maree shaw, sunCorP: I look after the outbound communications for the group – that is, all channels, all brands – and there are fourteen brands in our group, multiple call centres, onshore, offshore and so on. You have to have processes and leverage processes to make things easier. If you do not have processes, business rules and governance working across cross-functional teams like IT, marketing and distribution, you are going to have problems.

Mark Jones, ConferenCe ChairMan: Who is in charge of all of this?

anna-Maree shaw, sunCorP: No-one can make a decision on a day-to-day basis. But if you have the right governance model, framework and forums, then you have it sorted to an extent. You have to do it, in our case, by brand as opposed to by product.

kate kerr, MetLife: It is an interesting question, isn’t it, in terms of who owns the customer? It is the big question in most organisations – the term “customer-centricity” goes around, but what does it actually mean? Governance is a crucial. I look after the marketing, communications and client experience; my customers are both internal and external. It is about coming together as a team and making sure that everybody understands what we are trying to achieve with the customer. The customer is never going to be served correctly unless the employees are engaged. We can talk about technology, we can talk about customers, but actually empowered, engaged employees are the key to this.

Mark Jones, ConferenCe ChairMan: Do you want to define that for us though? People would assent to that intellectually, but realistically what does that mean? Do you sign up to cultural values, or are there performance metrics that you have to respond to within a certain time? We are hearing a lot about agile methodologies, which speak to that, but a lot of people would want to know more.

kate kerr, MetLife: Customer-centricity is a cornerstone of our global strategy. All associates have that in their objectives for the year, but it is not a generic approach. It is about what it means to each of them in their line of business and how they can better serve the customer. In each country we have a customer-centricity council, and that has representation across the whole business. We have somebody from each function and we come together and drive the customer strategy.

Having employees who feel empowered to do the job is really important. They feel that they can serve that customer effectively, whether it is an internal customer or an external customer. We do focus on both, because unless the team understand who the customer is and are engaged, the customer is not going to achieve the end result that they expect.

Mark Jones, ConferenCe ChairMan: Linda, you are head of customer focus, what is your view on how you measure these areas that we are talking about?

“It is rationalising your product systems,

simplifying the processes around that

and then optimising the touch points

and bringing them closer together.”

– Anna-Maree Shaw, Suncorp

“Information flow and integration is

very important from a technology perspective

to help deliver the customer experience.”

– Danny Malone, RACQ


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Linda Broady, aLLianz austraLia: We are moving towards a broader approach, where we are looking to implement metrics based on customer feedback across all key touch points. These metrics will reflect what the customer believes is important, as opposed to what we believe is important. We think this will be incredibly powerful in driving cultural change and building consistency in the level of performance our employees deliver.

Mark Jones, ConferenCe ChairMan: Danny, how do you see this from the technology side?

danny MaLone, raCQ: We do a similar thing in relation to the strategy coming from the top down. We drive the culture and we call it “member-centricity” – we are a member-based organisation. We are also driving it through KPIs and employee goals.

Mark Jones, ConferenCe ChairMan: Gartner recently put out a report claiming that the Chief Marketing Officer will have more spending power than the Chief Information Officer by 2017. Is that actually true?

anna-Maree shaw, sunCorP: The BankWest speaker yesterday was saying that the Chief Information Officer and the Chief Marketing Officer are ‘besties’. I think that is the play right now: that if they are not ‘besties’ then it is going to be really hard to make things happen. If it is not a team effort, the team will not be successful; the technology department is very important in driving change and need to work with the marketing department to promote the benefits of business transformations brought about from that change.

Chris kenny, ing direCt: I do not know what the trend would be, but collaboration is likely the key. We conduct some middle management development programs, and one of the ideas that came up was a way of making customer enrolment even easier and not going through all the identity verification. It was very much an IT solution brought by a team that had a marketing member. The question was, “Should we take money out of the marketing budget to build that?” I was very open to that idea.

anna-Maree shaw, sunCorP: We have been doing that – taking money out of the marketing budget to drive delivery. When I arrived in the organisation I noticed that there was no customer head at warehouse. Now we run a program office sitting in marketing that unifies what is happening with all the different changes upstream.

Mark Jones, ConferenCe ChairMan: But in that dynamic of letting go of budget, is there a shared sense of the importance of the particular channel that you are serving, and therefore maybe some of those traditional loyalties or ideas get put aside?

kate kerr, MetLife: If we are squabbling about budgets internally we are losing focus of what we are truly here to do – which is to grow the organisation and to serve the customer. If someone has a great idea and it is accepted, then it is about finding a way of implementing it, whether that means you have to shift budgets across the organisation. I know people are protective of their budgets, but if an idea is accepted strategically, then you just find a way of moving that money. Budgets are set now for next year and into 2015 – that is not to say they stay like that. It is about what makes sense to a business for growth and opportunity.

Mark Jones, ConferenCe ChairMan: Mani, how does it work from a supplier perspective?

Mani raMan, eMC aPJ: The challenge that we have when we are talking to customers is whether the focus is value creation or cost reduction. Are they mutually exclusive? Is it the Chief Marketing Officer who owns the value creation and the Chief Information Officer who is looking at cost reduction? Is there a mix?

anna-Maree shaw, sunCorP: Who isn’t looking at cost reduction?

Mani raMan, eMC aPJ: Everyone is, but is there an equivalent focus on value creation at the top line as well?

kate kerr, MetLife: I think there is. Through our global customer-centricity program we have consistent measures across all of our countries and you can get cost reductions through efficiencies. You can also create value to the customer because you are doing things more effectively and more efficiently. We have seen 20 million expense savings globally this year just attributed to this particular program. We have seen retained premiums of 250 million also attributed to that. Both these savings and growth figures are achieved hand in hand. They are delivered under the same program. So long as you are not making cost cuttings for the sake of it, and it is truly aligned to the strategy, then the two can sit harmoniously together.

audienCe Question: Has there been research into customers that switch channels midway through an application? Does that indicate they are not happy with the channel they started with?

“We are moving towards a broader approach, where we are looking to implement metrics based on customer feedback across all key touch points. These metrics will reflect what the customer believes is important, as opposed to what we believe is important.”– Linda Broady, Allianz Australia

“We conduct some middle management development programs, and one of the ideas that came up was a way of making customer enrolment even easier and not going through all the identity verification.”– Chris Kenny, ING Direct


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Linda Broady, aLLianz austraLia: You might set yourself a goal to deliver x number of transactions online, but at the end of the day, the customer will make the decision. Back to the example I gave earlier, online conversion rates might not reflect a poor experience as much as a basic customer need. Purchasing an insurance policy is an important decision, and customers may understandably prefer the reassurance of speaking before making the final decision. They have done their research online and they might shop around, but when they make their decision they want to feel reassured and secure in their decision. That is when they switch channels.

kate kerr, MetLife: When we were developing our online application, we did not initially have the usage data. Through techniques such as heat mapping and useability testing, where you do eye-tracking and see what is holding up customers in the application process, you start to understand where the difficulties and the barriers could be. Then you can put those improvements in.

audienCe Question: We are all asking customers what they want. What if they don’t know what they actually need?

danny MaLone, raCQ: There is a Steve Jobs quote that suggests that if you ask a customer what they want and then deliver it, they have already moved on. You have to be trying to think ahead – not just what they want now, more what they are going to want in the future. That is very important for us to think about. It will always change; it will not always be what they want now.

kate kerr, MetLife: When I call my frequent flyer reward supplier, they have an idea of what I could be calling about. This shows we are moving into a stage of predictive analytics, where we have been assessing trends and building the algorithms behind the customer experience, to be able to predict what that customer is going to be calling about. In the United States we realised we had sixty to seventy different systems with customer data. How on earth can an employee be expected to serve a customer effectively? We brought that together into what we call “the wall” – that gives us a single view of the customer. From that we can develop into phase two: developing predictions about what customers are going to be calling about.

Mark Jones, ConferenCe ChairMan: Is the single view of the customer the ‘holy grail’?

anna-Maree shaw, sunCorP: If you do not have a single view of the customer right now then you have a significant problem. How can you

possibly provide a seamless customer experience without that? The issue is the additional data to better understand what they need.

audienCe Question: How do you address and understand your current processes so you know which are the ones to improve?

Chris kenny, ing direCt: First of all, we would look at volume and assess where customers conduct their transactions, such as transferring money. Where are there large volumes of transactions, such as on the website, or through the mobile app? This usually dictates where we are going to spend a lot of time and effort. You can also clearly see this by talking to customers, listening to them to find out where the pain points are. We call these things “moments of truth” and they tend to have the biggest impact on NPS, customer satisfaction and loyalty. They are actually quite easy to identify if you have customer-centricity. If you have a customer-focused culture and your own staff are using the products, you can identify these things relatively easily and then just delve into the processes to make them easier. It is not necessarily about the process, it is more about whether it makes sense for the customer and how they are using it. There are things in the process that you are going to have to fix. We have constant passionate debates internally about “how simple can we make it?”

danny MaLone, raCQ: We have set up a process improvement office to deal with that across our group. It is their job to map not only customer facing processes but internal processes as well, because it all impacts the customer.

kate kerr, MetLife: The process is the experience. Every organisation should understand what that customer journey looks like through every product, every channel, every interaction, every ‘moment of truth’. The best test of that is to ask your employees to put themselves through the process that the customer goes through; sit them in a room and say “Use the application and tell us where your pain points are.” If your employees have pain points, and they know the product, then the customer is going to have pain points.

anna-Maree shaw, sunCorP: Nothing is more of an eye-opener than going through the process your customers go through. If you have not done that recently I advise you to.

Chris kenny, ing direCt: One example; we are borrowing an idea from overseas called ‘Brand Camp’. It is a cross-functional team looking at individual customer scenarios. For example, from where a customer has called; maybe they had to

“Through techniques such as heat mapping and useability testing,

where you do eye- tracking and see what

is holding customers up in the application process, you start to

understand where the difficulties and the barriers could be.”

– Kate Kerr, MetLife

“We have set up a process improvement

office to deal with that across our group. It is

their job to map not only customer facing

processes but internal processes as well,

because it all impacts the customer.”

– Danny Malone, RACQ


channel switch. We will all listen to calls together, and shut the scenario off mid-way through and ask ourselves how we handled it. So we have a discussion around that and it is interesting because when you lift up the curtain you find that sometimes you handle situations in ways that you did not want to.

Mark Jones, ConferenCe ChairMan: The iterative process is important here too. How do you turn those experiences into dedicated feedback mechanisms within the organisation? How do you actually make change happen?

kate kerr, MetLife: The important thing is it does not just go back up the line to the top management. One of the things we have introduced is a social innovation platform. We take particular issues or identified concerns, and we put them out to the whole company as a community. There is a short, sharp burst of two to three weeks of activity where we put the campaign out, we seek ideas and our employees vote. It is not the top management coming up with these ideas; it is our team that are out there serving customers, the whole of the Australian community of MetLife.

audienCe Question: Given the size of your organisations and your IT systems, how do you reconcile the need to be agile at your channel while dragging enormous line and business systems?

anna-Maree shaw, sunCorP: I am going to quote Thor Essman from the National Australia Bank who said that innovation is great, but continuous improvement is better. If you are not continuously improving, then you are not moving forward. If you take those core legacy systems and say “We are not going to be able to do anything” you would just choke on it. You just have to chip away, and it is continuous.

Mark Jones, ConferenCe ChairMan: We will leave the discussion on that thought. We have discussed some very interesting topics here today and it seems that customer centricity really is the main focus of your developing business functions and the industry as a whole is achieving this with the use of diversified channel offerings and the goal of promoting a single customer view and enhanced predictive analytics techniques. *

About EMC EMC is a global leader in enabling businesses and service providers to transform their operations and deliver information technology as a service (ITaaS). Fundamental to this transformation is cloud computing. Through innovative products and services, EMC accelerates the journey to cloud computing, helping IT departments to store, manage, protect and analyze their most valuable asset – information – in a more agile, trusted and cost-efficient way.

Financial Services Technology Media

where the market meets

About FST MediaFST Media produces the most successful technology conferences, roundtables and publications for the banking, insurance and wealth management sectors across the Asia Pacific region. With extensive management experience in conference production, journalism and business development, FST Media prides its reputation on unparalleled access to senior financial services executives, and the delivery of high-quality information on trends and disruptions in the financial services sector.

“Innovation is great, but continuous improvement is better. If you are not continuously improving, then you are not moving forward.”– Anna-Maree Shaw, Suncorp

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EMS2 -putting the customer in the heart of the organisation