How to Succeed with Customer Driven Business Transformation ft. Danske Bank
In order to maintain a competitive edge, companies must ensure that customer experience is at the heart of their business transformation strategy. Businesses need to understand how to use customer insights to evolve their products and services and generate higher customer engagement, greater willingness to recommend and create a more delighted customer.
The application of data and analytics is one the most promising methods of discovering new ways to deliver value to existing customers and tap into new ones. With the vast amount of data about customers that is provided through their interactions with businesses, there are a multitude of opportunities for companies to identify and demonstrate the actual value and impact of customer focused transformation. Today, Danske Bank is using customer data to drive its strategy. Below, Kasper Uhd Jepsen, Nordic Business Transformation speaker and Danske Bank’s Head of Concepts & Insight, Transaction Banking outlines the three steps that ensure this is a success:
1. Start With the Customers
“The first step is to accept that everything starts with the customer experience (CX) when you do strategic planning” says Kasper. “Part of this is accepting that a deep understanding of the customer experience is not the same thing as salespeople, who talk with customers every day, interpreting what they think the customer wants based on their daily dialogue.” Businesses must identify an effective way of analysing and accumulating insight about the existing customer experience in order to measure the business’ current level of performance for customers. To succeed with this you need high performing CX scientists (not bankers) that master both the engagement with customers, but also the difficult task communicating and changing management mindset regarding customer understanding. Secondly, you need to organise your transformation in a way where the accumulated CX insights are applied as pre-requisites in the multiple change programmes you are running. Otherwise you will most likely build the wrong thing or change your service model into something that the customer has not asked for.
2. Accumulate CX Insights Effectively
“The next and more difficult step is accumulating a scientific understanding of what the customer actually wants, for which segment, and for what products,” shares Kasper. This understanding can then be aggregated to the overall strategic direction of the business. When doing so, Kasper expresses that it is critical to facilitate an ongoing feedback loop. “When you work with customer experience on an agile basis, you have the opportunity to change what you are asking the customer as you conduct feedback surveys and interviews.”
Many companies send out feedback surveys, but without a strong hypothesis on what they want to change based on insight into what the customer wants (which they might not know themselves). Doing so makes it difficult to improve the quality of knowledge as they are boiling the whole ocean. “Getting this right is about creating the overview of all the CX data you have, grouping that data into the different categories, and then, checking that data and playing it back to management and to senior salespeople to get their reflection on what we believe the perfect solution for the customer is. Then we go back out to the customer and test it again”.
3. People Driven Agile That Learns
As we know from research, 70% of all changes across all industries are not fully successful. Key factors to succeed are to engage middle management in understanding CX and to let them drive change initiatives together with experienced employees. Typical transformations (or strategy executions) contain multiple project types – e.g. new services and products, E2E process digitalisation and change of sales, advisory or service models. “The common denominator is that it is really critical to understand customer needs if you don’t want to waste your effort and lose to competitors. And this is a big dilemma” says Kasper. “Typically, you have not fully understood all aspects of your customer needs before you start changing, but in order to survive you need to start the journey toward your vision”. Kasper explains that completion of point 1 and 2 above will prepare businesses to execute with lower risk of failing.
The final missing part is to organise your transformation to make it management and employee driven. How do you do that? According to Kasper, by facilitating the organisation to make decisions (how to win) and take ownership of needed changes in each organisational layer. “Yes, it takes a lot of effort to involve and train employees into transformation or change roles instead of having internal/external consultants do all the work, but it is all worth it when you come to the implementation phase of the projects which will be much more successful. If you have set the right management team, cutting external consultancy spend or large staff functions is typically an easy quick win as part of reaching your cost targets”.
To gain more insight into how Danske Bank is using a customer-driven strategy, click the image below:
On Thursday 21st of November, at the 2019 edition of Nordic Business Transformation, Kasper will share a case study explaining how your business can use a CX mindset as a starting point for strong strategy execution. He will also lead an interactive discussion group exploring the solutions for tackling resistance to enterprise-wide change. Find out more here.