Chief Experience Officer and Chief Marketing Officer
Beth Johnson wasn’t always comfortable raising tough questions.
“I’ve strengthened that muscle over time,” she said. “Now, as a leader, I make sure to reward those who do.”
Johnson was especially gratified to hear Sharifah Niles-Lane, hired in June to be social media director at Citizens Financial Group, ask whether women of color can succeed at the Providence, Rhode Island, company. “It meant a lot to me to have that candidate take her power and bring that question to me,” Johnson said.
Johnson — who, as Citizens’ chief experience officer and chief marketing officer, plays a role in diversity and inclusion efforts — is pleased with the company’s commitment to continue making strides in that regard. She recalled a performance management meeting in which she felt the women and men were not being assessed as equitably as possible. This time, she was the one to pose the delicate question of why. “We changed the outcome,” she said, “and actually, one of my senior peers came up afterwards and said, ‘I’m so glad you did that.’”
Johnson is the custodian of the experience Citizens creates for its customers, and with the COVID-19 pandemic raging, some of her most critical efforts of late have been in the digital realm and involved many teams across the company.
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Initiatives such as revamping the mobile banking app and developing a sophisticated analytics and arbitration platform to target messaging to customers more precisely helped facilitate a 10% increase in sales through digital channels in the past fiscal year compared with the previous one.
Digital sales accounted for 29% of all consumer sales and $898 million in revenue in the 2020 fiscal year, an increase of 67%. Citing data from Finalta, Citizens said its digital sales surpassed the average for regional peers by 17.4% and for U.S. banks by 23.45%.
