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Alleviating pain points is key in optimizing the customer experience: Citibank exec

During the session, Building a Customer-centric Culture, the executive explained that mobile lacked the ability for users to sign up to a payment account, resulting in them having to visit the desktop banking platform. This was a major pain point that Citi discovered, and after launching mobile capability for payment signups, the bank saw a significant percentage occurring on mobile.

“We went through and started eliminating pain points and completely redesigned the experience, and what we saw was that in an 18 month period NPS improved over 1500 basis points just from the efforts that we did,” said Alice Milligan, chief customer and digital experience officer at Citibank. “The other thing was, we accessed where we stood and what people wanted to do on different devices and different channels.

“So for example on mobile, people were not able to set up a payment account people,” she said. “When we finally launched that functionality it made up 35 pc of the payment account setups.

“It was really an interesting dynamic to see when you improve the experience satisfaction goes up, you start to drive production and call volume and you see activity engagement at record levels.”

Mobile pain points
For a banking customer, especially on mobile, it is easy to encounter frustrating moments throughout the user journey. For a major retailer or bank it can be difficult to have a completely cohesive experience, which can often be disjointed between backend and frontend capabilities.

Citi looked to streamline the customer journey to make it as convenient and helpful as possible. The bank combed through all moments within in the customer’s experience to find every possible pain point there could be.

Between in-store interactions, customer service lines, mobile capabilities and digital pushes, there are a variety of ways to connect with Citi. The bank found that no matter how many digital platforms were available to discuss account issues, consumers were still calling into call lines.

Changing the culture
A change in business culture can make a significant difference in creation of a streamlined customer experience. Citi now values monitoring customer pain points and then holds whichever team is responsible for the issue accountable, making sure it is smoothed over right away.

But also, the bank has created a platform in which all employees can flourish. Team members ranging from lower level to high are able to input their ideas or complaints into the platform to be submitted for review.

Each employee who submits content will receive a notification informing them it has been received, which will then be sent to the correct department who will let the employee know what is to happen. Those with the best ideas will be acknowledged for their contribution and act on the team to help bring it to fruition.

“People can put their ideas in about what is working, what is not working, they can be new ideas or things we need to fix,” Ms. Milligan said. “They can put it into this collaboration tool and we have a very rigorous process that within 24 to 48 hours everyone will get an answer that their suggestion was received, that is has been routed to the right organization to get addressed and they will get a response.”