To gauge success in her quest to enhance the customer experience at M&T Bank, Aarthi Murali examines key aspects of their behavior.
She can look at how long customers wait on the phone, for example, or how many times they have to click on the bank's app to get to where they want to go.
Murali also focuses on something that is harder to measure but that she sees as critical to achieving her goals: embedding a focus on customer experience across every department at the bank and encouraging teams to collaborate across departmental lines.
"We had to learn how to work horizontally," said Murali, who was hired in February 2020 as M&T's first-ever chief customer experience officer, a role that was recently expanded to include employee experience. The $208 billion-asset bank has more than 22,000 employees.
For Murali, there is no distinction between employees and customers when considering how well M&T is doing. If a process is difficult for employees, it also is likely difficult for customers.
"If we don't think about that totality, then we're missing a huge part of the puzzle," Murali said.
Murali came to Buffalo-based M&T from JPMorgan Chase, where she worked for 17 years, culminating in a role as leader of client experience for the company's commercial bank. But in her approach to customer experience, she draws on more than her career.
Although she was born in India, Murali grew up in Dubai, where she encountered people from around the world. The exposure to a variety of cultures piqued her curiosity, she said. But it also helped her hone a sense of empathy. "People were different. You had to be able to understand and know where they were from," she said.
When Chase began building programs around customer experience, she said it was a natural fit for her. "Because I think it's all about empathy. … Brands that are successful have a high degree of empathy, and that just means that they know exactly what you want, when you want, why you want it, and they use really good data and technology to do it."
Her work at M&T involves finding ways to ensure the focus on customer experience yields positive results. "You can be very empathetic. But at the end of the day, if I'm losing money or my product doesn't work, that does not help," she said.
Murali has introduced a range of tools and programs to address customer and employee experience. They include so-called "listening posts" that gather real-time feedback from employees and customers, allowing the bank to identify and fix trouble spots.
Under Murali's leadership, the bank rolled out an app for employees that allows them to identify things that are not working. "Oftentimes, because there's such a high sense of accountability with M&T employees, they'll say, 'This is how you need to fix it. Here's what you need to do.' So, part of the cultural shift was to say, 'We hear you and we're going to fix it,'" she said.
The use of real-time feedback came in handy as part of M&T's 2022 acquisition of Connecticut-based People's United Bank, which extended M&T into New England. Leading up to the conversion, her team monitored both customer and employee experience as part of its effort to sense, respond and fix any pain points that arose.
Murali also introduced a program called "End Your Week With the Customer," a regularly scheduled conference call in which all bank employees are invited to listen directly to calls from customers encountering issues. The sessions have led the bank to redesign products.
In a bid to expand the bank's understanding of customer sentiment, she is baking an understanding of net promoter scores, or NPS, into every department. In addition to simply sharing results, her team is working to ensure everyone at M&T is using and acting on the information.
For Murali, actions should address the root cause of what may be detracting from the customer experience. To do that, she established a customer experience engineering team to work alongside other bank departments, leading to discussions among departments that might not have communicated regularly in the past.
"Those were new conversations years ago. And now it's a very normal part of our DNA," said Murali.
Indeed, employees often come away asking for new things to fix, said Murali. "It's joyous to see that because then you know you've left a legacy and a sustaining impact. It's not just a project that you did and you walked away from."
But if anyone asks, she also has numbers to illustrate the impact of her work. In 2022, they include 110 policies redesigned, 65 touch points reduced and savings of 5.7 million minutes for customers and employees.
The results have made Murali a leading voice in the field of customer experience, a focus for companies of all types. She was the keynote speaker in March at Qualtrics X4, a customer experience summit. And she was selected this year as one of three winners – and the only banker – of Forrester's Customer-Obsessed Leadership Award.
Another mission for Murali is mentoring emerging leaders through M&T's EquityOne program, which aims to increase the number of Black, Brown and Latinx people in senior leadership roles. She sees herself as not just a mentor but also an advocate for those she meets in the program.
"For me, advocacy is a powerful word. That means you are championing for that person when they're not in the room," she said.
