Using customer needs as a North Star for CX

CX Network, one of the global leaders in premium content for customer experience professionals, recently announced the winners of the 2022 CX Elite Awards at InMoment’s Experience Forum.

The CX Elite Awards 2022 is a celebration of outstanding CX achievements over the past year.

The awards saw corporate investment banking company UniCredit win Best CX Impact in recognition of its CX program which was rolled out internationally and across all areas of the business.

In this exclusive interview, CX Network talks with Christoph Ramler, group brand and communication intelligence lead at UniCredit in reaction to the award win.

CX Network: What do you think is the most important thing to consider when implementing an impactful CX initiative?

Christoph Ramler: At UniCredit, we see the CX initiative more as an ongoing journey than an already reached destination. It is a journey which constantly adapts to changing environments while never losing sight of our North Star: the needs and feedback of our clients. When looking back, progress was a combination of different factors which will keep facilitating this journey also in the future.

“For a crew to perform well, it needs a clear direction from the captain.”

Every CX initiative starts with strong buy-in from the top management based on a common understanding of why customer centricity is important. The commitment of the company’s senior executives ensures focus and enables the program to navigate well through troubled waters when resources are tight and other priorities risk jeopardizing the endeavour. At UniCredit, client centricity is an integral part of the group’s strategic plans, including respective objectives and continuous measurement.  

“We all sit in the same boat.”

Customer experience-driven organizations differentiate themselves by the mindset their people apply rather than the tools and processes they leverage. Therefore, the involvement of key stakeholders within the organization is key to integrate customer experience into the organization’s company culture. As such, customer experience needs to be understood as a company-wide effort and not as an effort of a single department responsible for it. Sharing of success stories is key to keep on motivating colleagues to go the extra mile for the customers and finding the right ad-hoc solutions that go beyond defined playbooks.

“Pick your battles well.”

Another key element is to connect the CX initiative with important organizational strategic initiatives. This ensures the strategic initiatives are designed in a customer-centric way while the CX initiative profits from the attention it receives among senior executives.  

“Calm sailing comes from having a good navigator, a good crew and a good vessel.”

Lastly, the selection of the right people to spearhead the focus on customer experience. This isas well as having the right tools to provide a constant flow of Voice of the Customer to activate the frontline and allow product teams to perform continuous improvement are key facilitators. At UniCredit, at the beginning of the CX initiative, we recruited customer experience champions. The CX champions were senior executives that, irrespective of their functional role, advocated for customer experience within the organization and acted as facilitators for the necessary organizational change. Besides that, the selection of a group-wide state-of-the art customer feedback management tool that was connected to relevant UniCredit systems allowed us to pinpoint customer needs.

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CX Network: How did you decide which areas to target with your CX initiative? As part of your CX initiative, you introduced a centralized and effective customer satisfaction program that enabled instant feedback. What tips would you give to others looking to implement something similar?

CR: Of course, every organization is different. Therefore, there is no one-size-fits-all solution. UniCredit is a pan-European banking company with a client franchise in 13 markets across Europe. Before the CX initiative started, an assessment was carried out, allowing UniCredit to recognize the different levels of CX maturity and expertise we had in each market. Therefore, the decision was to go for a “glocal” approach by defining minimum common denominators as well as a group-wide taxonomy, the Net Promoter Score (NPS) measurement and management framework and selecting a global solution.  

This would facilitate the structured collection, analysis and taking of action based on customer feedback while at the same time allowing local markets a certain level of flexibility and freedom. As such, we achieved the necessary level of harmonization as well as relevant economies of scale while enabling local markets to find the best implementation approach according to local circumstances and objectives. In addition, as described above, the group’s strategic initiatives were used to prioritize implementations across countries.

CX Network: After implementing your instant feedback program, what did you uncover about customer expectations? Was there anything you were particularly surprised by?

CR: We see the major benefit of the instant feedback program in the fact that it allows our organization to have a constant stream of customer feedback on the “moments of truth”, to activate the frontline and provide central teams with inputs on how to further evolve and improve products and services. This allows us to take decisions based on clear evidence and numbers rather than anecdotal experiences of single clients.