Harnessing customer experience to build our flywheel

Many consumers dread calling their bank's hotline numbers after having been burned by less-than-ideal call experiences.

These include long wait times, being passed to different departments, and having to restart the process of explaining their issues. As a digital bank built from scratch, GXS Bank has the opportunity to reimagine this and do things differently, based on first principles. This means addressing the basic question: Does it make sense for the customer?

How did we do it?

To have a good grasp on the needs of consumers, GXS Bank did a series of consumer research surveys when setting up the GXS Customer Experience team. The surveys provided GXS Bank insights on the pain points consumers generally experienced. Based on the surveys, the three main challenges and gaps within the industry are:

1. An incomplete and siloed approach to customer service resulting in an inability to derive meaningful and actionable insights.
2. Customer support teams not being able to provide quick feedback as they are removed from upstream planning.
3. As a result, customer service tends to be reactive rather than proactive.

Knowing that addressing these challenges head-on would result in a more rewarding experience for customers, we built a customer-centric model built around a 3D experience strategy that looks at experience design, delivery, and diagnostics.

Putting the customers' voice in the centre of the design process

Customers are at the heart of GXS Bank. To ensure the products it rolls out respond to customers' specific needs and requirements, GXS Bank conducts in-depth customer research even before commencing the design process.

The bank goes a step further by embedding its customer experience (CX) champions within product squads.

These CX champions are engaged right from the conceptualisation phase, enabling GXS Bank to use the insights gathered to validate and reinforce concepts quickly.

In the developing and testing phase, the CX champions become the consumers' advocates, anticipating their enquiries and needs, thereby minimising experience gaps throughout the customer journey.

Meanwhile, data, research and feedback collected from the different parts of the bank and customers are translated into insights to provide a holistic overview of their experiences. These insights are transformed into actionable initiatives so that GXS Bank can constantly improve our offerings.

A great example of the above is GXS Bank's marketing efforts in relation to GXS FlexiLoan. Recognising that a significant number of customers take up the GXS FlexiLoan for home renovation and travel purposes, the bank looked at how it could make it more rewarding for customers taking out a GXS FlexiLoan to fulfil their dreams in these areas.

This customer-centric approach has played a key role in ensuring that GXS Bank's products and services are hyper-personalised and targeted. In 2023 alone, this feedback loop has led to numerous customer experience improvement initiatives spanning multiple departments within GXS Bank.

Tackling pain points

Meanwhile, the delivery experience is also enhanced through the re-engineered customer dial-in experience on two fronts.

First, GXS Bank is where its customers are. This means customers are able to locate GXS Bank wherever and whenever via the GXS chat or contact form on the app, the GXS hotline, socials, or the customer support email address at any time.

Secondly, the GXS Buddies are more than customer service agents who specialise in their niche areas of expertise. These support agents are allowed and even encouraged to handle customer queries without strict reference to a script, making interactions friendly and personalised.

Customers are empowered to switch between the different contact channels seamlessly without losing the context of their query. A customer may initiate contact with GXS Bank via the in-app GXS chat and switch to a phone conversation or if the GXS customer service agent feels that a call would be a more effective means of communication.

The context of the query is retained and the customer does not need to repeat their query or issues faced. Instead, because the process is so seamless, the customer might even mistakenly think they are always speaking with the same GXS Buddy.

This is the result of the close collaboration between CX champions and different teams, such as product squads, marketing, and customer support.

For instance, to enable 24/7 customer support and facilitate smooth channel switching, the teams collaborated to develop training programmes and processes, achieving efficient and effective customer support, and enhancing the overall customer journey.

GXS's approach has yielded significant results. A whopping 9 in 10 of our customers indicated they were satisfied with the company's services and it achieved both a high net promoter score (NPS) and customer support NPS score, based on internal data and surveys.

GXS Bank is accelerating its growth and further improving support efficiency in the coming months with automation, data, and technology. It aims to harness generative artificial intelligence to analyse and identify patterns, preferences, and behaviours of our customers to further improve the quality of customer insights. GXS is also looking to delight customers by pre-empting and addressing any customer experience issues in advance and proactively offering services personalised based on predicted needs.

This is how GXS Bank is harnessing the power of Al, big data, and automation to redefine the customer experience.

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Clara is head of  digiOPS & customer experience at GXS Bank. This article was first carried in Q4 issue of Asian Banking & Finance.

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Psst! Here's something else you should know:

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