Last week we had a conversation with Scott Holloway, who leads Customer Experience at APS Bank in Malta. Scott's approach to CX is both pragmatic and forward-thinking, balancing manual processes with a keen eye on future technological advancements. Here's what we learned:
Last week we had a conversation with Scott Holloway, who leads Customer Experience at APS Bank in Malta. Scott's approach to CX is both pragmatic and forward-thinking, balancing manual processes with a keen eye on future technological advancements. Here's what we learned:
Scott: We're a small team - there's four of us in total. Three full-time and one part-time trainee. We're responsible for customer feedback, complaints management, and customer experience management. A big part of our work is on the Voice of Customer (VoC) side, but we're always using that insight to try and improve what the business is doing to raise the bar for our customers and enhance our customer experience.
Scott: We monitor really, really closely any feedback that comes in, and we treat each customer's case individually. We have a very bespoke approach to complaints and feedback handling.
We do manual sentiment analysis on all feedback. Sometimes one customer can identify a broader issue, so we have to apply our judgement and assess whether it's part of our root cause analysis to determine if there's an underlying issue. We don't wait for that to get worse or to impact more customers before we start to take action. We do that as early as we can, as soon as we've identified that there's a pain point or something which can be improved.
Scott: We share insights with the leadership team and relevant management through various reporting streams. We have a weekly report, a monthly report, and we also highlight issues with the relevant stakeholders on a real-time basis as they come in.
One of our strengths is that we have a very high amount of buy-in from the organization. When we're able to identify a problem and put together a recommendation to improve it, we usually have strong support to do so. Issues that aren't too difficult to resolve often get addressed very quickly, which eliminates the friction that was causing the problem.
Scott: I've worked in very large organizations with 20 million customers, and now I'm in a much smaller bank. There are pros and cons to both. Larger organizations are often better resourced or better equipped to tackle certain things. They're a bit more robust. But one of the cons is definitely the speed of being able to deliver change.
In a smaller organization like ours, we have secure governance, but when we identify that something needs to be improved, we pretty much get our heads together and just start tackling it. I think that's one of the benefits that smaller players in the market have - they can be more nimble and more reactive to what their customers need.
Scott: When you're dealing with leadership and different members of management and trying to get their buy-in, you have to try and communicate in a language that they resonate with. For your financial team, your CFOs, your accountants, it's about numbers and ROI. It's about portraying not only the cost of doing something but what's the cost if we don't.
I'm a really big advocate that poor CX is expensive and that companies often underestimate this. Poor service is very expensive to maintain. If a customer has to contact your service center four times when you should have been able to resolve their issue on the first point of contact, it's not only poor service, but you've had to pay to service that interaction four times.
In CX, there are a lot of cases where if we can improve, it should offer business optimization in terms of efficiencies as well. As a CX professional, I never believe it should be at the detriment of the business. It should always be enhancing the business as well as offering a superior experience for our customers.
Scott: I'm quite an early adopter of new technologies, and I think AI is going to continue changing the world. In terms of customer experience, it's going to really help to unpick some of the unstructured data, to identify friction points in different ways.
There are already solutions available in the market now that can listen to calls and pick up on the tone of the customer to see if they're not happy, to understand why they're not happy, at which point of the interaction, what was said to them. The future is really exciting because hopefully, what that will allow companies to do is to be more proactive and intuitive without having to check in too much with their customers to ask them what they need.
Scott: I always view technology as a vessel to deliver what we need for the customer. It's very important, it's paramount. But I don't look at it as just, "What's this fancy technology? What can it do for the sake of it being impressive?" Is it delivering what we're going for? Is it delivering the outcome?
As the world goes increasingly high-tech and digital, a lot of journeys are becoming more uniform and streamlined. There are some benefits to consistency of delivery. But then it sometimes loses a little bit of the human touch. As CX professionals, what we can try to help our organizations do is to ensure that we don't lose that humanity, that there's a human being at the end of every interaction.
Talking to Scott was a great insight into how a smaller organization can deliver effective customer experience without relying on complex technological solutions. Here are the key takeaways:
1. Treat each customer as an individual
2. Communication is key
3. Leverage the agility of a smaller organization
4. Make the business case for CX
5. Embrace technology, but don't lose the human touch
6. Look beyond your industry
By applying these principles, organizations of any size can create a more responsive, customer-centric approach to their services. As Scott put it, "We cannot be fickle and have a short attention span as business people. We need to see what the business priorities are and strategic to that." It's about creating a culture where everyone is focused on truly understanding and serving the customer, even without the most advanced technological solutions.