Startups and fintechs are promising a customer experience beyond that of stuffy, old banks. This is true in most regions, but particularly in Asia-Pacific. So how does a bank achieve this and keep its customers happy? Patrick Brusnahan speaks to Union Bank of the Philippines to find out
Union Bank of the Philippines (UnionBank) is generally regarded as one of the best. Consistently in the country’s top 10 universal banks, it wants to be in the top three by 2020. It may not be the biggest bank in terms of branches – it has 317, compared to Metrobank’s 953 – but UnionBank feels it can compete in a different realm.
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By GlobalDataAna Maria Aboitiz-Delgado, chief user experience officer at UnionBank, explains to RBI: “We don’t have the largest branch network, but we want to deliver the best customer experience. This is especially because non-bank competitors are coming into the market and delivering good experiences. We’re trying to not compare our experiences to other banks, but to the best experiences across all categories.”
Customer experience
UnionBank has based its whole customer experience campaign around ‘making the difference’ or ‘Make Da Diff’. The customer experience team, which has existed for around a year and a half, has honed in on this to change things, both externally and internally.
Aboitiz-Delgado says: “[The campaign] signified what UnionBank desired: to create meaningful and customised experiences around the needs of the community. This formulates our customer experience strategy of focusing on the customer and building solutions to cater to their needs.
She adds: “It’s also about not settling for what the experience is, but continuously improving what we offer. That’s gone as far back as the 2000s. Over the years, we’ve really been delivering solutions that do cater to communities.”
Two new offerings have been created to up UnionBank’s customer experience game. First is the ARK. The first fully digital bank branch in the Philippines, the ARK is also paperless.
It set out to address customers’ needs without taking up too much time, and is hoping to be interactional rather than just transactional. In addition, Talk to Rafa, the country’s first banking chatbot, was launched. Accessible 24/7 and via Facebook Messenger, it can answer users’ questions by utilising Natural Language Processing.
“Customisation and customer focus have taken on a new level in the bank,” Aboitiz- Delgado explains. “That’s because we’ve gone through a digital transformation; we’ve realised that there are many more tools available to use to enhance the customer experience.
We recognised the need to address even the most basic customer experience needs – when I say basic, I mean available 24/7,
delivering straightforward experiences and striving for reliability.
“This kind of standard goes across all of our products and services, whether that is the app or the branches.”
Personalisation
With digital processes coming more into play, two things need to be done for it to be an attractive option: personalisation and addiction.
“We believe that, to be competitive, customer experience needs to be personalised, and that’s where data comes into play,” Aboitiz-Delgado explains.
“Analysing our current customer behaviour and current trend to ensure we are delivering personalised efforts – digital channels make this easy to deliver.
“Another key is to become an addiction, and to do that we need to embed ourselves into the lives of our consumers. This is where API strategy comes into play. We need to make our services available where they want them to be. Embedding it into different apps is an example of that.”
However, just because digital has become a great aid does not mean UnionBank has ignored traditional services. While digital services are available for a number of transactions, some customers still want to see a face.
Aboitiz-Delgado adds: “I believe that more customers, to varying degrees, want to be able to do low value transactions on digital channels. That’s why we redesigned our app to make those available on mobile and to deliver a better experience.
“We do believe that offline channels are, at this point, equally as critical. While we’re not going to expand our branch network, we still believe that it is a key component in delivering certain experiences. We do believe people still want to visit a branch; they may want to go there to get advice or fix something.
“The role of the branch is going to move from a transaction channel to somewhere I can go to get advice or solve something. The branch is a great venue to have conversations and interact with the community. We do think branches will come back for different reasons.”
Asked if customer experience can be a differentiator in a congested marketplace, Aboitiz-Delgado concludes: “Absolutely!
