Building a customer-centric culture in Bankwest’s Customer Service Centre

Everytime a customer leaves feedback on their Contact Centre experience at Bankwest, Shamus Hurley, Customer Service Manager in the Customer Service Centre team, automatically receives a notification telling him what they thought.

While this process might sound small, it’s what the Bankwest team does next with the feedback that is having a big impact at the leading Australian financial institution. Positive responses are shared back to the agents responsible to let them know of a job well done, while negative feedback is rapidly addressed to stop issues from escalating and used to inform continuous improvements in the organisation’s customer service.

It’s a change that’s led to significant improvements at Bankwest - for both customers and colleagues.

Staying aligned with what customers truly want

“The Contact Centre is the heartbeat of Bankwest. We believe everyone deserves a simple, friendly, and secure banking experience. Listening to the voice of the customer is critical to delivering on this,” said Hurley.

To ensure customer feedback is used to guide customer service improvements at Bankwest, teams analyse all structured and unstructured feedback captured by Qualtrics weekly to identify any leading indicators of a negative experience and to quickly resolve issues. This approach allows Bankwest to build a complete view of its customer experience and prioritise fixing the biggest issues impacting customers.

Voice of the customer is ingrained into every project at Bankwest. It allows us to focus on what matters most to improve our customer experience, and ensures we’re making decisions and changes based on fact rather than gut instinct,” added Hurley.

Some of the actions taken based on feedback include changes to the small business credit card application process, which reduced approval times from months to days, updates to the interactive voice response service helping lower wait times, and improvements to the mobile app.

Great experiences for customers and colleagues

The impact of Bankwest’s efforts to focus its Contact Centre around the voice of the customer is seen in its NPS score, which has tripled over the last five years.

“How we perform in the Contact Centre directly impacts how people perceive and view the Bankwest brand, which can have a big impact on business outcomes. As such, it’s critical we’re focused on delivering value to our customers in every interaction and across every channel,” said Hurley.

Alongside driving improvements to the customer experience, Bankwest’s customer-centric culture has positively impacted colleagues, too. Over the last 3 years colleague engagement has increased by 7.7%.

“The reinforcement and recognition achieved by sharing positive feedback with team members is gold. People want to see how their work directly impacts business performance, and this step drives people to deliver a better customer experience every day,” said Hurley.

The power of why

As Bankwest looks back on what has made its program a success, the financial institution is quick to highlight the ability to access real-time responses, review and analyse verbatim feedback, and automatically trigger action when negative feedback is received.

“In competitive and rapidly changing environments like today’s, knowing what truly matters most to customers and how you measure up against their needs and expectations is key. It’s why I believe any business not meaningfully using the voice of the customer is missing a huge opportunity to deliver more value to the people they serve.

“Every business has the ability to turn detractors into promoters. All you need to do is understand customers’ why so that you can deliver what they want and need to be happy,” concluded Hurley.