Banque Saudi Fransi (BSF) won the Excellence in Customer Centricity category at the Middle East & North Africa (MENA) Banking Excellence Awards 2022 for their Ask Once program that is designed to enhance customer experience (CX) and ensure seamless service.
You only get one chance to make a good first impression. That is why Banque Saudi Fransi (BSF) in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) has designed and implemented its ‘Ask Once’ program to improve its CX since 2019.
As its name implies, the “Ask Once” Program centers on improving CX to the extent that customers would need to ask only once to get things done without any hassle. The bank identified 5 main areas that needed work on this front:
Driving cultural change: Culture must be at the core of any change towards a better customer experience. Even when employing automation, people are at every business’s front when a customer pays a visit or has a problem. The bank’s work to drive cultural change is focused on translating existing values and goals into actionable principles that guide how employees interact with customers. The Golden Rule at the core of this change is urging employees to treat customers like they would want to be treated
Listening to customers: BSF mainly use the Net Promoter Score (NPS) methodology, which relies on sharing a single question after interaction with customers and asking them how likely they would recommend the company to others. NPS has been one of the most effective methods of measuring customer feedback, with its power lying in its simplicity that makes it easily usable and trackable. The bank does not only use the NPS with customers, but also with employees, to measure their satisfaction with their work, as well as the bank’s processes they are involved with.
Gathering feedback and acting on it: Using the power of a customer experience management platform, surveys are customized and shared periodically with customers, social media listening data is actively tracked and analyzed, and reports with KPIs ads are created, shared, and discussed to create action plans for the next enhancements. To guarantee the transparency and effectiveness of all these efforts, external research companies assess the CX performance of the bank.
Additionally, mystery shopping is used with various branches through undetectable schemes. Improving survey response rates is one of the highest priorities the bank has set with this strategy, as higher response rates mean more data and highly reliable insights. Achieving this is not easy, as survey fatigue needs to be resolved in many ways, including the way surveys are sent to various customers, customized messages to every customer, and perfect timing to ask for feedback.
Training employees: To ensure new joiners are properly onboarded, and existing employees are effectively working as planned, several training programs were launched to serve the “Ask Once” program goals. The training programs cover call back, huddle, and root cause methodologies, as well as other customer experience best practices. Next, the bank is planning to collaborate with companies offering the best customer experiences in the world to bring their expertise into the bank and the customer experience on all levels.
Governance above all: Leading all these efforts and changes without governance can never lead to a consistent service level or goal achievement in the long term. BSF recognized this and made governance a major change driver. A huge effort was put into translating the goals of the “Ask Once” program into strict policies, clear guidelines, and efficient documented processes. As customer experience metrics including NPS are analyzed, action plans are created while ensuring their alignment with the bank’s strategy.
The CX Committee, formed in light of the transformation program, is held periodically and led by the Chief Executive Officer of the bank, with the main goal of ensuring the CX strategy and its results are aligned with the company’s strategy Raising the standards of customer experience and translating them into actions that are documented and governed is how a real customer experience strategy or transformation program can be executed and sustained. Focusing on employee experience is also essential, as BSF strongly believe that highly engaged employees, working in the right environment, can deliver a differentiated experience to their customers.