Transaction:
Miriam Cross: (
Hi, welcome to our customer experience, track for the session. We're gonna be talking about serving clients of all sizes with Shaleen Prakash, the head of digital and segment operate operating solutions at Silicon valley bank. Brent Reston, head of digital channels at Wells Fargo and Liz Wolverton, the head of consumer banking and brand experience at Synovus. Well, thank you all for joining us. I just said your names and titles, but I love it if you can, since this is about serving customers of all sizes, if you can tell me each a little bit about what kind of customers you serve. Shaleen, I'll start with you.
Shaleen Prakash: (
Yeah. Hey Miriam and hello everyone. Shaleen Prakash, I work for Silicon valley bank. For those of you who may not be familiar with the bank Silicon valley bank we say is the bank of the innovation economy. We are serving some of the innovators disruptors on one end of the spectrum. And on the other end of the spectrum, we are serving some of the biggest VC and private equity firms out there. The bank has been in existence for almost 40 years, and during this time we've established a very dominant position across both sides of this marketplace.
Miriam Cross: (
And how about you, Brent?
Brent Reston: (
Hi everyone. Brent Reston, from Wells Fargo. I've been at Wells for about a year. So coming up, I'm becoming a veteran now at Wells Fargo after a year, I guess. Lead digital channels, I think I said, so it's all the digital product for our consumer facing mobile app, online, public site, and then all the things customers do on those channels. So servicing in financial health, money movement account opening and I'm based in San Francisco. It's great to be here.
Miriam Cross: (
In terms of the size of customers you serve, it runs the gamut.
Brent Reston: (
It's all.
Miriam Cross: (
And how about you Liz?
Liz Wolverton: (
Liz Wilton with Synovus, $50 billion bank in the Southeast, many of you know us well. I, as a head of the consumer bank, I oversee our retail distribution networks, over 250 branches. I also oversee for the company, our digital experience for both consumer and commercial, as well as marketing, but as far as the clients we serve, it runs the gamut at perfect clients of all sizes is what we do on the consumer side, everything from mass market up the spectrum, you know, to family office, and then on the commercial side from micro-businesses all the way up to public entities. So we're on the spectrum.
Miriam Cross: (
Thank you, Liz. So Synovus is a 50 billion dollar asset regional bank. How do you think, like the serving customers is what are like sort of the challenges you think the advantages compared with larger banks as on this panel?
Liz Wolverton: (
Yeah. So almost 140 years old. So I think one of the advantages is the longevity and the relationships built kind of generationally across our client base. So I think that's a very big, strong point for us structurally the way that the organization is set up. We keep the decisions close to the customer. So I think from a standpoint of responsiveness and really relationship, that's extremely helpful. From a positioning standpoint and value proposition standpoint, I think the challenges are obvious for a $50 billion bank. Some of the scale, the technology investments are difficult. I think the silver lining of that is the game's changing. I mean, with Fintechs and other partnerships, we're really positioned differently than we have been, but let's face it. I don't have Brent's budget when it comes to technology and I'd like to have that sometimes, but I think that's probably the biggest challenge for us is scale and really building not only the digital components, but everything else that goes with, I think the digital delivery today. So it's the analytics arm, the data arm, and having all of those resources can be a challenge, but I think we're finding ways to solve it.
Miriam Cross: (
And when we spoke before, a couple words you used when describing what it was like serving customers as a regional bank or flex like a mid-size regional bank or flexibility and less complexity. Yep. What did you mean by that?
Liz Wolverton: (
So some of that was when we were talking about, you think about in today's, banking environment and the way that strategies have to shift. So organizationally we have a really tight, executive management team. And so as priorities shift, we have the ability to get together, be pretty flexible. It's never easy making decisions and shifting priorities. But I think the structure itself enables us to do that and then position our teams to execute pretty agilely when it comes to, you know, the size of this organization. I think again, like I said, keeping decisions close to the customer, which we try to do through both processes and policies is another way that keeps us really flexible.
Miriam Cross: (
And Brent, from one of the largest banks in the country, how do you make customers feel like you are serving them personally and not that just they're one and a massive people?
Brent Reston: (
Yeah. I mean, personalization is what we all look to do and probably all have been doing for, for quite some time, but I mean, it has to be personalization that matters, right? It's something that customers actually feel and you can deliver you can deliver at scale. And I mean, you think about some of the personal personalization that does matter. You think about other industries as well and what works. And again, oftentimes they're not enormous swings, but they're things that are very impactful. And I mean, we're at a digital banking conference, so I assume some people in the audience will have a Tesla. One of the amazing things that Tesla did, in my mind, I think it was just about two or three months ago is you've got your phone in your pocket.
Brent Reston: (
You walked to the car, the car knows that you it's, you, you open it. But up until two or three months ago, every time I would get in, because my wife likes to drive my car and, you know, gas is $35 a gallon in California. I'd get in, I've got long legs and I'd get in sideways and I have to adjust my profile, but two or three months ago, Tesla, Tesla decided to make this change. And now every time I get in, it knows it's me. And away ago my legs fit in the car. So I mean, like small examples of that, and again, very impactful things, are things that I think we all and you know, need to focus on. At Wells, we've got a lot of things coming. I think we've announced we're gonna be launching Fargo, which is our virtual assistant. We've also got some things coming on the payment side on the financial health side but launched to come. I'll talk a bit more about our, our new mobile app as well, I'm sure later on.
Miriam Cross: (
And Shaleen, as you know, your Silicon valley bank is the one on this panel that does not have any branches. So how do you think that affects your delivery of customer service?
Shaleen Prakash: (
Yeah. Great question Miriam. Let me explain just a little bit about the customer base of Silicon valley bank. As I explained, as I answered that question. So, as I mentioned, it says the bank of the innovation economy, 50% of US backed tech and life sciences firms, they bank with Silicon valley bank. So you're looking at some of the most innovative, most disruptive companies, not just in the US, but on the entire planet that are actually banking with Silicon valley bank. And so the question is not like why do we not have branches? The question is for the kind of customers that were actually dealing with, even if we had branches, we posted that they would actually never walk into a branch. Think about the people who are disrupting their own industries, solving customer pain points, technologically, why would they ever walk into a branch?
Shaleen Prakash: (
Right? And so for us, it's no different than what Brent was saying and what Liz was saying around. It's all about keeping customer at the center of the universe and saying, what does the customer need? And let's actually build our experiences and our banking proposition around them. And so for us, it is actually meant, an immense focus on technology. There are no branches for the customer to walk into. These are not the kind of people who will ever walk into a branch to say, Hey, I can't make my payment, or can you actually send a wire for me? These are not the kind of personas that will do that. So for us, it's about building end-to-end digital experiences, digital and delightful experiences, because these are the customers who are, who know what good looks like. They're not your main street clients.
Shaleen Prakash: (
They are disrupting their industry. So they know what delightful and awesome looks like. That's number one, building those into additional experiences. Number two is these customers are harnessing technologies in new innovative ways, and they have the same expectation of us. And so how do we take the best of breed solutions that are available in the market? And if they are not available in the market, then how do we build our own solutions to ultimately drive best in class client satisfaction. As I mentioned, these clients are not satisfied with your normal average experiences. So how do we stitch together the right of the shelf solutions to drive the best experiences for them? And then the third factor, which actually becomes very important because we don't have branches is arming our client servicing associates, to be able to serve these customers in a variety of ways.
Shaleen Prakash: (
I mentioned they will never have a question around how do I initiate a wire, but they will always have a question around, hey I am a small startup, five guys in my company. I do not have the money to have a sophisticated expense management solution in my organization. Can you give me an odd stream of my card transactions because I wanna plug it into my slack channel. Now imagine that for a second. Your odd stream of card transactions is feeding it to your slack channel. Everyone in that 5% company can actually see in real time when a transaction is happening. Do you really need an expense management policy or do you need like double and triple layers of approval to do that? No. And therefore in our world, the branch doesn't exist and doesn't have to exist, but all of that has to be made up by delivering beautiful experiences leveraging the best in class technologies.
Miriam Cross: (
Yeah. Liz, something you said before, you said to me before I thought was really interesting was you talked about how Synovus is trying to get to a place of delivering more relational experience rather than a transactional experience. What did you mean by that and how is Synovus doing it?
Liz Wolverton: (
Yeah, just to be clear from a digital standpoint. So, obviously a lot of pride and kind of the relationships we've built, but if you think about two pretty big things that are coming into play today a more of a shift away from the physical than ever. I mean, we are reducing 15% of our branch network just this year, and that's after several years of continuing to make branch reductions. So obviously still serving those clients, but serving them digitally and they were very dependent upon that in person experience for the relational piece of our partnership. So when you go to the digital device and you shift more there, it can't just be about speed and ease and seamlessness. It has to be more so we have to add a layer onto that digital piece that brings in the relationship as well.
Liz Wolverton: (
The choreography's just different today. How many times they're gonna go into a branch is obviously gonna go down. So we are partnering with personnel. So I think you probably heard some of you heard from Jody earlier today, so that when you go into your app, it's not just that you're gonna see your balance. It's not just that I can, easily make a transaction or have other features and functionality, but I'm also gonna introduce some of those relational insights to you. Have younoticed your spending patterns, have you noticed this potential cash flow issue or here's an opportunity to save? I can also orchestrate then when those touchpoints need to be coming on the back end of those insights. So it's really blending that more in a more meaningful and deliberate way.
Liz Wolverton: (
And that's really the big piece of what we're doing I mean, one of the things. The other thing I would say it's not just the shift in delivery, but it's the shift in expectations from the customers. We all know that customers have expected a great experience, but many of you probably read the JD power reports like I do. So, in June their survey came out, this is 80% of customers say, it is their bank plays an important role in improving their financial health, not an important role of trust or not an important role of just holding my money. But 80% say it plays an important role in improving my financial help. So the more they go to digital servicing and digital interaction, the more we have to take it there.
Miriam Cross: (
And so you mentioned Personetics is one company you're working with, when will those features be added to the app ?
Liz Wolverton: (
In the fourth quarter of this year.
Miriam Cross: (
Okay, and Brent, on your own, what are your thoughts on trying to have a more relational or personalized customer experience rather than transactional?
Brent Reston: (
Yeah, I mean, it's both, and we're certainly down that path I mentioned. I think everybody's aware of a lot of the change at Wells Fargo. I'd say there's like a sea change on the digital side as well. We've relaunched our public site, we've relaunched our consumer facing mobile app and there's a lot of reasons for that. I mean our public site, I don't think it had been touched in eight'ish years, which is, I don't know, like 80 digital product dog year equivalent. It's a long time. Our mobile app was a website with a wrap around it, right? A web view app and so we've gone out, we've relaunched a new iOS native, Android native mobile app.
Brent Reston: (
It's beautiful. We're getting lots of great feedback from customers. We were talking before about how sometimes you see a bit of a dip in customer satisfaction when you launch something big and new, we saw a little bit of that for a little bit, but right away it kind of popped back up and we're already well above where our legacy app was. So that's phenomenal. And you mentioned JD power. We are super excited and if I'm honest, a little surprised because I think their survey period was like February 18th to April 1st, we launched our new app February 16th at 1% exposure and kind of ramped from there. But just with that one drop, I don't even know if we'd done a maintenance drop at that point. We went from six to third. So, great progress.
Brent Reston: (
Obviously, a lot's changed since then. A lot of change will come in the rest of the year, but a big piece of what has to change and what will change is moving away from transactional banking. I mean where we all started five years ago was that you come and you check your balances transactions, and so on. We're all layering in insights, throughout the experience. And again, I think some of the things you'll see at Wells will certainly go much further down that path beyond targeted things or little bite size insights. It'll be much more of an integrated experience.
Miriam Cross: (
And you mentioned, you said there was a dip after you introduced something new, is that mostly because customers take some time to get used to the new format?
Brent Reston: (
A little bit, and honestly it wasn't that much, but probably the biggest driver of it was we took out a lot of the proactive seeking of feedback, which we did purposefully because we basically only wanted to get the negative feedback. Right? Which people that have something to say or experience something negative are very motivated to give you feedback. So, honestly, as soon as we turn back up the kind of, will you rate us or give us some feedback type prompts? We are already there a couple weeks out, we're already above where we were.
Miriam Cross: (
And Shaleen, how is Silicon valley bank trying to achieve a more personalized or relational experience?
Shaleen Prakash: (
Yeah. So as I mentioned, we've been around for almost 40 years. The bank has been super successful, but most of that success had come on the back of what we call as the analog business model. And I think everybody in this audience who knows anything about commercial banking knows that commercial banking is all relationship driven. So we were no different in that sense, but the writing was very clear for us that as the bank of the innovation economy, if we do not innovate, if we are not prepared for what we actually call as the digital age, tomorrow will not be ours. And so over time, the bank has invested significantly in a digital transformation. This journey started about three years back, almost coinciding with the time that I was hired. And over the last three years, we've invested massively in technology.
Shaleen Prakash: (
Now again, reflecting back on the session suddenly today we were talking about many of the demos earlier today and multiple platform providers showcasing their wears. One thing that probably everybody would've related to is, yes those experiences are great when you're serving customers of a particular size. But think about our challenge where we are starting when it's two guys in the garage who have nothing but a brilliant idea. From there they go from becoming five people to some day 10 people get seed money, keep growing, growing, growing, eventually get series A through X and ultimately become publicly listed firm. So for us, it has been less about personalization because the experiences were always personalized. There always was a commercial banker, a relationship manager, whichever name you choose to help these customers along the journey. For us, it has been, how do we actually build that right experience for the customers so that when this particular entity grows from two players to 10 players to someday having a very sophisticated, when it's two players or 10 players, the founders are still doing most of banking, right?
Shaleen Prakash: (
But when you actually grow up to be, let's say a series X company, you now start to think about a more sophisticated financial department. You have a CFO, you have a treasurer. So the persona that we're actually serving is fundamentally changing along those life stage maturity. And so how do we actually build the right stack so that that stack does not need to have changed as the customer is actually graduating. That's actually a term that we use client graduation, right? For many other banks, I'll call it a blue moon phenomena where a small pizzeria for example, is becoming a national brand for us. It actually happens pretty much on a daily basis where those two guys in the garage, all for a sudden get on the radar of a big VC firm and all of a sudden they see explosive growth.
Shaleen Prakash: (
So for us, it's all about building the right experience that actually scales as the customer scales along their journey, not just in terms of the size I was talking about the other vectors to consider some of these players might actually grow across geographies. I might have presence just in the US, all of a sudden I decide to venture into other markets. I don't wanna send them to a different platform just because you're banking in UK as well. I want to give you the exact same experience that you are proud of here. We want to continue expanding the solution offering to you across all those different vector. So personalization for Silicon valley bank for us takes a very different meaning vis-à-vis let's say somebody like a consumer banker or let's say else.
Miriam Cross: (
And I love that image of, like two people who start company in their garage and then it grows into a huge company. Do you have an examples of technological upgrades or features you've added that serve that kind of growing clientele?
Shaleen Prakash: (
Absolutely. So when we started this digital transformation effort, almost three years back, just like any other banker, we looked around in the market to see whether we can get somebody off the shelf to accelerate our journey and not surprisingly given the uniqueness of our business, we realized there was no one solution out there that would meet our needs. As much as we would've loved to bring it, it doesn't exist out there in the market. And so we decided to undertake this journey ourselves. We have built what we refer to as an open platform open in the sense that we are buying what we consider to make commodity solutions to accelerate our speed to market. We are buying the best in class vendor solutions, but we own the experience not surprising for anyone out here.
Shaleen Prakash: (
This is additional conference. Experience is the differentiator in today's world. And so we own our own experience. We have our own team of product managers, designers and researchers that are helping build the right digital experiences, but underlying technologies, open platform where we have, let's call it 20 plus different vendor solutions that have been stitched together. Last three years, it has been a lot of intense activity, but I'm glad to say that this new additional banking platform that we've built, it's called SVB go, it's live at this point in time. We are experiencing client satisfaction scores of somewhere between 80 to 90. For those of you who are in a similar field, you will hopefully attest 80 to 90 CSAT is unheard of in commercial banking. And so for us to be actually able to do that in the timeframe that we've been able to do it is impressive. So I do think that we are on the right track. There's definitely a lot more work than needs to be done and I love to say that the best is yet to come for us.
Miriam Cross: (
And, another important feature of customer service is building trust with customers. Brent, on Wells Fargo's end, how have you been working towards that?
Brent Reston: (
Yeah, it's the foundation of everything, right? It can be built, it can be rebuilt. What is not is building like a feature in the app that is like our trust center, right? It has to kind of permeate everything. We have a new head of XD experience designer, name's Natalie. She started a month ago, so she's like almost a Wells Fargo veteran like me, but she talks about eliciting joy in our customers to drive trust. And for a lot of us, that sounds pretty ambitious developing.
Miriam Cross: (
Yeah. What's the connection ?
Brent Reston: (
Not enjoy as I'm coming into banking app, unless suddenly there's "I've saved more money than I thought I did" or something like that. But, if you think about joy as coming in and having language brought to you that is not jargon it's customer friendly, it's the way we would speak to each other, things are easy, there's movement, animation things flow, things are easy as I come to do my banking and anticipatory, right? You're coming in and kind of I'm able to find and do what I'd like to do quickly. So, I kind of like that idea of joy kind of being a harbinger of trust and there's a lot we can do in that space.
Miriam Cross: (
Okay. And Liz, curious what your thoughts are on the role of artificial intelligence in terms with customer service. Because when I think about really good customer service, I often think about human to human interactions.
Liz Wolverton: (
Yeah. Well, especially in the consumer space, obviously you have a lot of customers. So we have close to a billion customers or million customers in the consumer space and so you can't know each one of those personally to the extent that you can provide that day in day out timely interaction, but through AI and some of the things that we are doing with analytics, Personetics was one example. I mean, that's taking the data that our customers give us every day and giving it back to them in a way that's usable. And so, I'm really excited as we talked about that we're coming out with a hundred insights in the fourth quarter and that's just kind of a tip of the iceberg.
Liz Wolverton: (
The next step for us is to customize some of those insights so that we can, through the machine learning and through the artificial intelligence that we can connect better with those customers in those moments that matter. I think the other thing that's helping us do is actually discern the personality of our customers when we don't see them every day. So whether that's the spending patterns or whether it's the content that they interact with, and we're actually trying multiple versions of creative of content on individuals to see how we can best engage them. It's those sort of things that technology really enables us to do in a very different way and in a very distributed and scaled way with our customers. And thinking, when you talk about trust, you've gotta start with the basics of, yes you have a secure environment. Yes, you have a transparent environment, but when it comes to trust, it really gets back to, are you looking out for my best interest? And that means more than reducing my clicks from five to three. And it means more than, it being really easy when I get into the device, it means adding true value every time I go in and that to me is where the trust is really built. So an AI can really enable a significant strides as far as that's concerned.
Miriam Cross: (
And Brenton, how would you say that AI supports customer service at Wells Fargo?
Brent Reston: (
Yes. And that it's not MySpace, A peer of mine runs AI on our platform, we obviously work very closely and how it all integrates, but I think where we're looking to go is, something that obviously helps the customer, right? As they're coming in, they need help. They need a little bit more advanced help and maybe just a basic navigation or search can provide, but then also bringing those insights and bringing value to the customer. Again, AI and leveraging a financial assistant within an app is really like another channel, another delivery mechanism. A very effective delivery mechanism when done well and obviously, I'm sure many people have examples of when not done well. So, it's important that it is done well, it's integrated, it feels part of the bank ecosystem and that takes a tremendous amount of work to do that right? In order to integrate all the data, the feeds and then again, how it's brought to the customer through the channel.
Miriam Cross: (
And how long has the virtual assistant been around?
Brent Reston: (
Well, we are in the process of launching our virtual assistant. So I don't have any grand announcement on timing right now. The team's fast at work. We are moving fast. That's one thing that talking about the sea change we built our consumer facing mobile app in 10 months from ground up. So it was an intense 2021. We launched the app in February and I think that's part of what you'll see is just the speed at which we can move when we've got the right people, the investment from leadership and the belief in what we're looking to do.
Liz Wolverton: (
I think you have to remember too, it's risky, right. I mean, AI is really good when you get it right, but it can be devastating when you get it wrong. So I think that's what we have to be careful with in regards to where we go with it and doing a real stairstep approach because you can take a relationship that you've built over a lot of years and ruin it really quickly if the AI goes wrong.
Miriam Cross: (
Yeah. Shaleen, the last minute and a half. What are your thoughts on AI in the role of customer service?
Shaleen Prakash: (
So, just like Brent mentioned, we are actually getting started in this space. As I mentioned, additional transformation still is what I'll call as early stages. Couple of things that we've done and I'm not in a position to share our leads as yet, but on the customer sites, we now have instrumented the sites so that we have all the data available. As you know, most of AI ML models need to be trained. And so given the newness of the platform, we have the right instrumentation in place to harness the data, drive insights, and then we want to drive the right decisions based on the data assets as well as leverage AI and ML models. So that's on the digital side. Plus we are also in the process of deploying chat bots, timing TBD which again, as you know is a great use case of AI and ML.
Shaleen Prakash: (
The other area where we are actually leaning in and investing heavily is on the decisioning side of the house. So whether it be the card decision, whether it be in terms of approval, decline or whether it be in terms of your card limit, or in terms of your low dollar loan decisions, those are the areas that we are exploring right now. So stay tuned for more updates on this in the next couple of quarters and on, but this is an area that we definitely believe in as an organization.
Miriam Cross: (
All right. Well, that's all we have time for. Thank you all so much for joining us.
Shaleen Prakash: (
Thank you.