The customer and employee experience go hand-in-hand at financial institutions. In fact, according to research conducted by American Banker, three-quarters of banking professionals largely agree that customer experiences shape the way work happens at their organization. Laurén Robbins To, VP Financial Services at ServiceNow, sits down with Janet King, VP Research at American Banker, to share how top organizations are overcoming workflow barriers and forging paths to unparalleled customer experiences. Listen to the now on-demand session to gain insight on:
- How the employee experience plays a role in driving desired customer experience outcomes
- Where banks should focus to reduce complexity and create a more seamless employee experience
The risk and reward balance when it comes to leveraging emerging technologies such as AI
Transcription
*Transcripts are generated using a combination of speech recognition software and human transcribers, and may contain errors. Please check the corresponding audio for the authoritative record.
Janet King (00:10):
Hello, and thanks for joining us today. I'm Janet King. I'm the VP of Research and Content Solutions at American Banker, and today we're going to be diving into the employee experience strategies that banks are adopting to create a positive pathway to desired customer experience outcomes. More specifically, we're going to be looking to see where some synergies exist or are being nurtured and to explore some of the things that might be getting in the way. Joining me to discuss this topic is Laurén Robbins To. She's the Vice President of Financial Services Industry at ServiceNow. Welcome, Laurén. Hi, Janet. Great to be here with you today. I'm excited to be here too and to be able to discuss this topic with you. I think to get things started, can you just take a minute to tell us a bit about your role at ServiceNow and your involvement with the industry, because I think that would be helpful context for the discussion.Laurén Robbins To (01:01):
Absolutely. So my involvement in the financial services industry started at the beginning of my career. I was on the investment banking side and the capital markets, specifically the debt capital markets side of the financial services sector. And then saw the evolution that was happening in terms of technology and the way technology was really starting to transform the sector. And so joined, I went over to the technology side and started my journey there at Salesforce standing up their capital markets business and saw another evolution as technology was really driving new digital strategies across the business. And that's that so much investment was being made in the front end in the digital end, but digital transformation wasn't stopping there as I was looking at use cases like client onboarding with my customers, it really was becoming a front and still is a front to backstory across every aspect of a bank or financial institution that serves a customer.(02:13):
So that got me really excited about what I do today, which is I lead the financial services business for ServiceNow. ServiceNow is a workflow automation platform that spans the enterprise and we talk about front to back digital transformation. That's my world. And I have the amazing opportunity to work with over 1200 customers in the financial services space that are using the platform, 23 of the top 25 banks. And we're partnering with them across many different flavors of transformation initiatives spanning from customer servicing to the customer and employee onboarding, exceptions, management risk and compliance. We really do run the gamut of transformation across the enterprise. So I'm very excited to share some of my learnings with everybody here today.Janet King (03:05):
Yes, me too. That's very helpful, thank you. So we're coming into this discussion together, having recently completed some research at American Banker in partnership with ServiceNow, that was designed to really explore sentiment around the customer and the employee experience from the perspective of banking leaders who are setting the strategy and resourcing the initiatives and also those frontline employees who are really tasked with delivering on the customer experience. And we partnered on that research to understand how and if banks are thinking about those parts of their businesses more or less, two equally important parts of the whole. And with the understanding that getting those initiatives right or conversely getting them wrong can have a pretty significant impact on bank's business outcomes. And there's a lot of data to support what's at stake. In fact, I recently saw some research from Forrester that showed that retail banks that regularly practice customer experience optimization grow 3.2 times faster than competitors than don't.(04:10):
It's pretty significant. And we also saw ample evidence that empowering employees to deliver on those CX initiatives is really critical to success. And if you fail to pay equal attention to that employee experience, it can really have a pretty significant and negative impact on things like workforce productivity and employee retention and more. There was one example I think that came from McKinsey that talked about a bank that had used detailed customer feedback and analytics to redesign five critical customer journeys and they were able to reduce their service call volume by 20% while improving their overall customer experience and engagement. So again, lots of data showing that getting this sort of CX imperative right is really important. But in your role, Laurén, you talked to so many banks and I'm curious what kinds of conversations you're having about the role of the employee experience in driving the right customer experience outcomes.Laurén Robbins To (05:10):
Yes, absolutely. Janet. What was interesting when we launched this research together, my initial reaction was customer experience and employee experience. They're not new terms at all for the banking industry. And I would almost argue they're almost overused terms, we just hear them so much. But when I go in to meet with customer executives at the top banks, 99% of the time customer experience remains a top focus. And I would say what's also interesting is the employee experience dimension of that. Maybe six years ago when I started ServiceNow as a C-level initiative, maybe that came up 30% of the time, but now I see that probably 60, 70% actual CEO sponsored initiatives around employee experience. Because I think to your point, there is a growing awareness of that interconnectivity between customer and employee experience. And you've mentioned some really exciting and jaw dropping, quite frankly, outcomes because there have been strides made in this area and there is a clear business impact for leaders who are doing this well in terms of customer loyalty, cost efficiency, or even shareholder returns.(06:33):
But when I think about why this evolution in employee experience, it really is kind of an openness to how that challenge is being framed in the mind of banking executives because employee experience, the way I've seen it defined in the past has really been about building a better experience throughout the employee journey. So that could be attracting talent into a bank, it could be onboarding talent, transitioning offboarding, and the role of technology and HR and other corporate functions in shaping that employee experience. And we've done some great work with customers in this space to really improve employee engagement with these corporate functions like HR Standard Charter is one of my favorite. They by putting automation and digital channels in, so to make it easier for employees to face off or interface with HR, get their questions answered more rapidly, they saved over 104,000 productivity hours per year by putting in things like self-service and digital.(07:40):
They deflected 85% of cases that went into hr. So their agents and talking about employee experience, they had greater capacity to serve those employees when they use live chat, they were able to get answers. Employees were able to get 90% of their answers in under 30 seconds. So that's a huge impact. But to that is, gosh, once I've had this great employee experience being onboarded, for example, and now I have to go in and actually do my job and serve the client, is that a dimension, the employee experience that really has been considered from a transformation perspective? And that's where I see the evolution in thinking is that there is that awareness of this interconnectivity because when you go to do your actual job and then you're going from these digital channels and this great technology experience to a world of manual work or disconnected processes, teams and systems, it's very eye-opening.(08:45):
And I think about work we did with Bank of Montreal, I actually just did a webinar like this with them quite recently and they had a really ambitious transformation agenda around their treasury and payment services. In fact, their goal was to expand the reach of their network by 300%. And the two drivers behind that were exactly what we're discussing. They wanted to improve the customer experience and their customers at the time we're only engaging with them on the phone and with email. So they couldn't track progress of where their issues were, get SLAs. But the employee experience in that was equally as important, both in terms of driving efficiency across teams, reducing cost to serve. A lot of their employees were working in really outdated systems and they felt that that was actually handcuffing them from serving their customers in the right way. And they were serving a gamut of different service requests, things from onboarding, servicing, technical support, and they just were very, very handcuffed in how they could do that.(09:51):
So they use digital workflow to help to drive faster resolution and to help them increase the volume of customer inquiries and requests that they could handle. And they integrated across all their different apps. So across their commercial banking and online platform, they had its channels integrated and different systems integrated and a single kind of interface that connected customer to their agents. They use live chat, so better digital channels beyond phone and email so customers could get more immediate answers to their questions and that set their agents up for scale. They then were able to handle two to three x the volume because of these digital and automation technologies. And the results and the impact were just staggering. They went from the ability to handle 3000 interactions a month with their customers to over 30,000, and they did that in just one year. And so now they have running through their platform a million customer engagements and think about then the gold mine of data they're sitting on to continuously improve the customer experience from that. So that's kind of the interconnectivity we're seeing across the space.Janet King (11:10):
Yes, it's a great example. And those results are pretty staggering and a pretty concrete example of what you can really achieve when you get this right. And it's interesting because as an industry we've been talking about and taking actions I guess to digitally transform banking for a lot of years, both on the front end, the middle, and all parts of the business. And those efforts really accelerated during the pandemic. And I think the yardstick for what matters has really shifted because success is increasingly measured not just in comparison to experience. Customers have certainly on the front end side with other financial institutions, but their best customer experience with any business in any industry. So what customers are expecting from their interactions with their banks and other organizations has really shifted. But the data we've been collecting through our research efforts here at American Banker really suggests that while we have made some progress, we haven't yet made significant progress at that end-to-end digital transformation of the business of banking. And we just completed a survey that showed that roughly half of the banks that we spoke to are talking about their digital transformation progress at being at best siloed, right? It's delivering value in specific business areas or specific functional areas, but not consistently yet at an enterprise level. And fully another 25% would characterize their progress only as incremental. So I'm curious what you think we have learned from our attempts at digital transformation in banking.Laurén Robbins To (12:53):
Yes, it's an excellent point. I was actually with McKinsey not too long ago in an executive meeting and they put some statistics up about digital transformation in banking. They had surveyed hundreds of c-level banking executives about their transformation efforts. And what they found was nearly 90% of the banks represented had some sort of AI or digital strategy. But what was staggering was the percentage of those firms that solved the revenue impact and cost reduction impact that was intended by those transformation efforts. And it was 30% had achieved what they wanted on the revenue side, and actually surprisingly even less 25% on the cost reduction side. And as we think about what the root cause of that is, it really is a persistent disconnect across people, process and technology. And when there's disconnect there and fragmentation there, it makes it nearly impossible to transform. This is for very good reason.(14:09):
These are really, really hard problems to tackle and solve. There's been a lot of investment that's been made in core systems and legacy technologies that are very, very critical to the DNA of these banks. It's made that very hard to get data and to be able to mobilize data across a bank. And these are very, very difficult problems to solve. But the opportunity when those problems are solved is absolutely massive, especially when you think about emerging tech like AI and what we're seeing, and I'm an optimist despite the fact that this is a very challenging space because we have seen banks drive transformation efforts and actually as little as 12 to or 16 weeks. And if I think about why it really is those banks that know their customer journeys inside out, the ones that matter, the ones that are trapped with just are held back by friction.(15:16):
And they really do make efforts to look at the journey front to back across systems, people and channels. And I'll give an example of one that did this and did this in 12 weeks and not even for one process, but actually for seven customer journeys in their payment operation space. And that was some work we did with Lloyd's Banking group. So they saw a ton of friction and cost associated with in essence how they handled payment errors as a firm. So I paid the wrong person, my payment didn't go through, and now the bank has to go and execute processes to go and recover those funds. And they had 450,000 individual cases that were coming at them each year of this flavor of payment exception handling. And each one of those cases was taking their employees four hours to go and solve. And when you do that math and multiply that, that's a lot of time that each of these employees is spending on one case and a lot of cost.(16:17):
And as a result, they were missing SLAs, they had compliance implications. And what was holding this up as they looked at the process was that there were 15 manual steps that their employees had to do for any one of those cases. And the steps. And when we think about employee experience and just how cumbersome this is, were about manually grabbing data and creating a case or manually checking email and sending emails or updating a spreadsheet tracker or two different case management systems being used in the front office and in the middle office that they were constantly having to update or they were making errors getting data out of these systems and they were having to rekey and validate customer and payment details. And they were bold enough to reimagine, gosh, which of these could we really automate if we were to integrate these systems, automate the pull of data across these systems, give one interface for our customer, our front office and our middle and back office to operate in.(17:21):
And they were able to take those 15 steps down to two manual steps, literally opening the case in the front office and making a decision about the case in the middle of the back office. And the results were amazing. So within 12 weeks for the first process and every subsequent process, they went from the parent error process being a hundred percent manual to being 72% automated, and that four hours that it took to resolve a case came down to 27 seconds. So imagine if you're a customer looking to understand where the heck my money went, and being able to now get that answer in 27 seconds, it's absolutely remarkable. And what was also the last thing I'll say, very powerful is that once those integrations were set up for those core systems, they were completely reusable to subsequent processes. So that's why we saw some of the really good time to value outcomes because they were able to get scale by setting up those integrations one time.Janet King (18:22):
That's incredible. I mean, that really is just jaw dropping that you could get down to 27 seconds from that kind of workflow. And I think we saw that same data in the research, right? Inadequate technology was the thing that people most often pointed to when we asked them where the customer experience is most broken, followed by things like disconnected workflows and two little process automation. So all of the things that you just spoke to are real pain points that we're hearing from all these various data collection efforts that we're working on with you and others here at American Banker. So let's talk about compliance, because compliance came up a lot in our research and in conversations as a key challenge to establishing some of those more seamless employee workflows and efficient customer journeys by both the folks sitting in bank leadership and the frontline employees.(19:19):
And in fact, among those banking leaders that we talk to, only a minority feel that their banks are effective at removing barriers that can impede employees efforts to address compliance requirements and actually deliver the best customer experiences like you were just talking about. So things like eliminating data silos and creating those seamless connections that you just spoke about between the front office, the middle office, and those back office functional workflows. And again, manual tasks, right? Huge, huge barrier. And then it's a frequently mentioned frustration for frontline employees as well. They site it as a common reason for drain on their productivity, and it's a frequent roadblock that they face when they're trying to work with back office functions to meet customer needs. So those employees are feeling the compliance pain too. What have you foundationally, what are you seeing banks do foundationally to address employee's ability to more effectively address those compliance requirements as part of the workflow?Laurén Robbins To (20:21):
Yes, I mean it's an excellent question because we all know that regulation and regulatory change is a huge constant in the banking industry. And when we talk about the disconnect between people process processing technology, the ability to more easily achieve regulatory compliance is another side effect of that. When that's broken, it gets harder or it becomes something that a lot of costs and a lot of people and a lot of manual effort are just kind of thrown at. But the opportunity is that when processes are digitized and they are connected end to end, a lot of magic can happen. So data about those processes is easily traceable. So for things like reporting reasons and you have processes that are completely repeatable, they're standardized, and anything is absolutely reportable and it's reportable in real time, which is a really powerful thing. So you just contrast that right to the scrambling that can occur to prove compliance when this is done manually and it's done in spreadsheets and when kind of just people are thrown at the challenge.(21:34):
And the customer I really enjoyed working with around regulation and the end, really the interconnectivity between transformation automation and regulatory compliance was Jefferies around this past May. There was a big, big change in the industry, in the global markets industry around T plus one. So in essence ensuring that or speeding up trade settlement times a full day. So talk about just automation, the need for speed and the compliance implications for that. And so if you look at Jefferies within their trading operations, the way they were doing this, and in essence what they had to do is find faster ways. The straight through processing trades weren't the problem. It was the exceptions and the resolution of those exceptions and the investigations behind that, the coordination with the counterparties and being able to do that much more quickly. And the way they were trying to do that was that they were pulling reports from in essence, Broadridge, which was their core system every day.(22:46):
And then they were manually looking at the trades, filtering them, classifying them, and prioritizing them where there were exceptions. So that resulted in thousands and thousands of emails just flying all over the place in shared inboxes where a person was manually assigning them and sorting through them, and they were correlated then back to the reported exceptions or documents that were pulled from Broadridge, and that just wasn't going to give them the 24 hour cycle time improvement that they needed to hit the regulation or meet the requirements. They put in what they called a single operations workstation or hub, and they did it in 16 weeks back to some of the times of value, and it gave them a single pane of glass for their operations professionals to look at a trade exception case. And it connected into Broadridge and it connected into Outlook, and IT connected Symphony and teams all their different communication channels.(23:49):
And now that that data was coming out of the system of record in real time, there was no more need for manual reports and classification of exceptions. They could build all that intelligence into the system and create workflows to resolve on the back of them. And what was amazing about it is that they were able to drive 90% improvement in their resolution times for these high risk exceptions as a result of that. But it didn't stop there because there's also the aspect of proven compliance. So once that data was centralized and digitized, you think about the impact to the audit process, which was done manually. People would have to pull emails together, make reports, walk auditors through the process, could take hours now instead of just, and they were doing that for just a sample set of trades, now they can bring up any exception live in the workstation, they could walk an auditor through it in minutes. And so what they saw there was a 95% faster audit resolution time as a result. And I think this is really important because our regulators are getting a lot more sophisticated in the scope and size of data that they can look at and the technologies they're using, and they're squeezing timelines and scope, I'm sorry, expanding scope and squeezing timelines on the banks they're working with. So this was a really powerful way to unlock some of the efficiency and automation and real time aspect to help to solve a regulatory compliance.Janet King (25:29):
That's amazing. And what was the time it took to sort of make some of those changes? How long were they working on that with you?Laurén Robbins To (25:36):
So from start to finish deployment, they were able to do it in 16 weeks.Janet King (25:42):
That's amazing. Thank you for sharing that. Well, let's talk a little bit about some emerging technologies like AI. You mentioned it earlier in the start of the conversation, but many banks are experimenting with things like generative AI and looking to already activate or starting to activate the technology and a number of use cases over the next 12 to 18 months. And some of the more common use cases are like using it to help customer service reps address customer questions or to onboard clients. We're seeing a lot of use around marketing communications and just using the tech and data to personalize customer experiences. So what do you see as the risk and reward for banks with emerging techs like AO?Laurén Robbins To (26:33):
Yes, I mean, I think there's a huge opportunity here. I think it is a crawl, walk, run, certainly as emerging technologies are being considered and starting be adopted. And I'd say just like with compliance, the right foundations have to be in place to really take advantage of emerging tech, like having connected processes, data that's accessible, et cetera. We did a lot of work around Gen AI, even internally with our HR function. And when I talk about the crawl walk run, there was a good amount of human intervention and oversight at early stages to ensure customer data is handled responsibly and securely. That bias and false positives and the models that are being used being are handled appropriately. And so there's a trust building aspect as you're considering these technologies. But I think the opportunities are absolutely endless, especially with things like ai. There's a customer we work with on the, who's a prepaid and payment network services company, and we're on this two part journey with them as they're using us as an AI platform because we do have AI and intelligence capabilities baked into our platform.(27:54):
And the first was just simply around customer servicing. So they had a pretty big growth in their payments and their gift card network, and they were going into the holiday season and their support teams were really struggling to deal with their increased call volumes and they were operating in that fragmented and siloed environment that we've been talking about. And so they needed to automate these support processes, and it was to the tune of 1.9 million emails that they had in one year alone that this team had to go through and they had an opportunity to take out some expense and to increase their capacity for the higher season. And when they put in essence capabilities around AI powered task intelligence that help them categorize incoming support requests and prioritize and then kick off the right work stream, not only did it help to decrease some of the call volume and help to offer some self-service, but it also increased the capacity of their agents in the cases per hour that they could work on.(29:05):
They went from 5.6 to 10, they had virtual agents that were engaging with their customers and giving them tailored support articles that also deflected cases coming into them. And when they saw the outcome of that and the benefit of AI on the IT support side, they then then brought us into the disputes management and managing disputes, which also they kind of struggled across multiple systems and spreadsheets to kind of address and manage. And this part of the industry actually we see as a huge opportunity where AI certainly could play a really big role because of the increase in dispute volumes over the last several years, especially with the rise of digital payments since the pandemic and the cost associated with processing them was $25 actually is what we scope it out for just one dispute to be processed. So if you multiply that by the thousand of disputes coming into the bank, there's a huge efficiency in cost play.(30:08):
And so this firm put in actually a solution that we have out there in the market that brings in a Visa integration and got some really foundational efficiency benefits from having real time processing and that connection into the card network, having the data available in real time to reduce error rates, compliance with the latest card network rules to reduce penalties and scalability as we continue to add those integrations into the solutions that we offer across more card network providers and compliance. We talked about compliance, there's reg E guidelines and controls that were built into those processes as well. But on the Gen AI side, actually some of the intended outcomes in the process of implementing this now that they're citing are really exciting. So they've talked about Gen AI driven summarization that as cases are being transferred across their firm to different business groups, that by summarizing that case, it's making their agents more efficient and it's going to drive down their handling times by 30%.(31:19):
They talk about also case summarization as a tool to help ensure that as those cases, as those communications are being created, that the manual effort of correcting errors inside those is going to go down by 25%. They talked about having clearer communications back to the customer about what was happening around disputes and faster responses back to customers, improving customer satisfaction and trust. And then they had some really cool stuff on the predictive AI side too, that being able to look for and track suspicious activities and be proactive in mitigating potential fraud as well as looking for potential dispute abuse cases by looking for themes across businesses or names or emails and being able to more proactively prevent some of the losses that can come from things like that. So again, this all starts with having the right data and the right processes and the right foundations in place, but the benefits and the opportunities with some of these technologies are just tremendous.Janet King (32:30):
Totally agree. And we've been talking a lot about tech and process automation integrations today, and certainly you've brought of great examples today to the table to really demonstrate what kinds of benefits banks can get from making some of these changes. But I'm also curious to get your perspective on how you see banks organizing people in teams to build more connective tissue between their employee experience and customer experience initiatives.Laurén Robbins To (33:02):
Yes, so I'd say there's not going to be a single owner for employee experience as we look at the evolution and the interconnectivity with that and the customer experience. But what we are seeing is better partnerships across the stakeholders that need to come together to make this more impactful and more of a reality. And so when I was actually with a customer in the asset management space not too long ago and their entire HR team and their technology team, and I was walking through a common use case that we see a lot of wealth and asset management firms working on around how do they transform the advisor lifecycle from bringing an advisor on board to bringing their book of business on board to then ensuring ongoing advisor support for all of their business needs to serve the client. And I had thrown this use case out there and said, listen, you're focused more on aspect, maybe number one.(34:18):
But again, back to my point about when these advisors come in to do their actual jobs and serve their client, do they have the tools and technologies that they need? And the big aha moment in the room was this is really a collaborative effort and maybe it's a more expansive effort that it's not just about HR and corporate functions or their technology partners, but it's also about maybe the COOs within these lines of business that are looking at things like operational efficiency and client satisfaction and the role and how well employees are equipped or advisors are equipped to deliver on that, that they need to come together and collaborate. And we talked very much about doing the next briefing and meeting together as a very big expansion to include some of those stakeholders. So I think we're all kind of learning together on this journey, but there's a huge opportunity with this task force that I think needs to come together across those three parts of the business.Janet King (35:18):
Absolutely. So more people are going to have seats at the employee experience table as time goes on. Absolutely. Any final thoughts before we wrap things up today, Laurén?Laurén Robbins To (35:28):
I think if I had to think about some of the parting takeaways that I'd like to leave with our audience here, the first is just a sense of optimism, right? Is that there is a lot of possibilities in the future for the future in terms of transformation efforts and the technologies out there exist certainly to enable that and to provide those tangible business benefits that we've talked about. I think the second is about expanding this aperture around the employee experience because I see a lot more focus here and a lot more opportunity to use that as a catalyst to continue refining and impacting the customer experience. And I think the foundational aspect of getting that connectivity end to end across people, process, technology, what that opens up from not just a customer and employee experience, but from a regulatory compliance perspective and as a foundation to responsibly adopt some of the emerging technologies out there is a really, really big opportunity. It's been a pleasure to talk about some of these topics with you today, Janet.Janet King (36:50):
Yes, thank you, Laurén. Thank you so much for sitting down with me today, and I want to give a big thank you to the broader ServiceNow team for partnering with us on the research. And finally, a special thanks to everybody in the audience who tuned into this discussion today. We really appreciate you joining us. So thank you and have a great day everyone.
