Four key ways ANZ is unlocking the value of experience management

In response to the shifting financial services landscape, over the last few years ANZ - one of Australia’s leading banking groups - has been on a transformation journey to build a new retail banking platform that will be the future foundation of ANZ in Australia.

Central to this shift has been a fundamental rethink about the group’s relationship with customers and employees, and how the organisation approaches building propositions designed to meet their evolving and unique needs. Customer and employee feedback has been central to this change, equipping ANZ with valuable insights to deliver meaningful change to its community, customers, and employees.

In a recent fireside chat at Qualtrics XM on Tour, ANZ Chief Marketing Officer Sweta Mehra outlined her four top tips for improving customer and employee experience, including why it’s important to be bold, curious, and persistent when a business is undertaking a transformation journey.

Differentiating through and end-to-end experience

When ANZ made the decision to embark on its transformation journey, the leadership team was focused on delivering value to the customer.

“One of the early decisions made by the leadership team was to go on a CX-based transformation that placed the customer at the centre. While we knew we wanted to be about the customer, what was less clear to us was what we wanted to be famous for,” said Mehra.

“At this point, we came together again and realised that ultimately we want ANZ to be a bank linked to a world where people and communities thrive by improving financial well-being. But that’s just a word and a phrase. We had to go to the next level in terms of how the customer experiences this and how our employees deliver on it,” Mehra said.

“To ensure it was taking action rather than simply paying lip service to customer experience, ANZ designed a brand equity pyramid, which helped us to identify our points of differentiation. For ANZ, these points were being a trusted financial coach, to make banking easy for our customers, and to personalise the products, services, and experiences delivered to customers at every stage of the customer journey. The entire CX-based transformation program at ANZ is rooted in these principles,” said Mehra.

These principles are apparent in the recently launched ANZ Plus app from the group, which helps customers closely track and control their spending from a single app, while providing access to expert financial advice and support.

Having set the direction, ANZ also realised the role of marketing needed to change from simply being about customer acquisition to a place where one to one communications with customers was the centrepiece of the operation. As Mehra says, marketing is also about retention and engagement, not just getting the customer and then moving on.

“Making the customer fall in love with the brand has been a long journey,” she says. “It has taken us years and every time I get impatient, I think about the famous Pantene campaign, which had the tagline: ‘it won’t happen overnight, but it will happen.’”

Making employee experience just as important as customer experience

Delivering on its goal of having customers fall in love with the brand means employees need to deliver on the customer experience journey, which is why, Mehra says, employee experience is just as important. “If the employee doesn’t have the tools they need, if they are not happy in their jobs or don’t feel valued, the whole undertaking falls apart,” Mehra says.

For Mehra, employee experience falls into three parts – the first is the direct experience or, as she says, the human experience. This means giving staff the tools they need to be successful and solve customer problems the first time around.

The second component is the belief every employee helps define customer experience.

“It’s not about what a brand is, but what it does,” Mehra says. “ANZ built a brand academy and a marketing masters program empowering employees with the tools and training to ensure everyone talks the same language and consistently articulates the same brand values.”

Finally, culture is important. Measuring employee experience helps ANZ understand if employees are landing well, are happy in their jobs and love being part of ANZ. A content and fulfilled staffer means they’re able to fulfill the company’s vision for its customer experience.

Measuring outcomes

“Everything marketing does is about customer and employee experience,” Mehra says. “ANZ has three rallying cries, based around how to drive reputation, how to drive revenue, and how to deepen customer relationships.”

In terms of reputation, Mehra says industry issues can affect how ANZ is viewed by its customers, so it’s important for the bank to understand what part of perception is driven by it, and what is attributable to broader matters.

“Revenue is driven by both direct and indirect revenue but, most importantly, customer relationships depend on converting a detractor into an advocate. It’s not about the complaints you get, but how well and how quickly you resolve them,” Mehra said.

Bold. Curious. Persistent.

Finally, Mehra says she counsels all her staff to adopt BCP principles; that is, be bold, be curious, and be persistent in their work.

“If something was easy, it would already have been done. People need to work with empathy, with scale and with speed and, most importantly, not give up,” says Mehra.