How a real-time customer feedback loop is helping OFX gain agility

Why the international money transfer company invested in a voice-of-customer feedback platform and how NPS is informing client experience innovation

A new voice-of-customer management system is not only closing the loop on client experience feedback for international money transfer company, OFX, it’s also actively informing products that build competitive edge.

OFX commercial director, Sarah Bernhardi, told CMO the company previously used a third party to manage its Net Promoter Score (NPS) program, conducting a quarterly pulse check on customers. This meant client feedback was being collected months after interactions, and wasn’t specific enough to take action off the back of.

In addition, a wider push to integrate digital into the OFX business and client experience end-to-end required a stronger VOC approach, she said. The digital push is twofold: Reduce the overall transaction costs, and meet customer demand to do more online.

“Anticipating the amount of change coming our way to client experience from this, and recognising 70 per cent of transactions are undertaken by existing clients, I was mindful of that change,” Bernhardi said. “I knew changes included radical enhancements to the user interface, and keeping our finger on the pulse as to whether those were being received positively was important.

“We could deploy touchpoints across our digital assets as well as other contact channels.”

The other objective was real-time feedback. “Supporting cultural change internally and putting the customer at the centre of everything we do meant making sure that customer voice was being heard daily,” Bernhardi said.

Having worked with the Qualtrics platform previously, Bernhardi bought and began scoping out the technology on the same day, going live 12 months ago over a period of six weeks across OFX’s client experience business.

Helpfully, marketing had already deployed a customer journey strategy using OFX’s existing Salesforce Marketing Cloud platform, and could just drop the Qualtrics survey prompts into those interaction touchpoints. “This gave us scale quite quickly,” Bernardi said.

Read more: CMO interview: Spearheading the global rebranding of OFX

The team started with three key touchpoints on private client business: After the first year; after a customer’s first transfer; then once a customer has undertaken at least three transfers. This has since been expanded to those who have registered but not yet transferred money, a critical verification milestone.

“On-boarding is a real opportunity for a number of us in this industry,” Bernhardi commented. “We have such strong risk governance, and can be a real client experience jar. We can measure effectiveness as well as the client on-boarding experience quite specifically now.”

Cultural impact

Key was getting real-time feedback to support that content and change strategy, as well as put the customer at the centre of products and programs of work. Today, that VOC data is coming straight to product teams via a real-time dashboard rather than semi-regular reports.

“The level of detail we can analyse goes right down to the currency corridor - we can see when we have issues with third-party banking providers before customers raise the alarm with us,” she said. “The abundance and depth of feedback we get from clients is something I keep reflecting on… we’re seeing a shift on the consumers side and people are more open to providing feedback. The interfaces are easier and therefore they’re more inclined to.

“Leveraging all that, we were motivated to deploy these touchpoints beyond what we initially mapped out. So it was an unexpected benefit that we could use the insights beyond our own products.”

Culturally, the platform has prompted a greater sense of customer urgency in the business, Bernhardi said. Within two hours of feedback being received, someone from the client team will have contacted the client to offer assistance.

“It’s working its way into our Agile development in-house, in our stand-ups, and you’ll regularly hear NPS being cited in those contexts, which is powerful,” she said. “This is driving real change in the client experience on two levels. One is in the products, and specifically our app, which we launched this year. A lot of minor elements are a direct result of the NPS program. There’s a constant trickle of features and upgrade in our monthly updates, too.”

It’s also OFX’s business rules. Given OFX has been in business for 20 years, this has resulted in legacy business rules, many of which hadn’t revisited.

“It’s helping us enhance our risk management practices. Our risk management culture has been both critical and a point of differentiation. When done well, it drives trust and speed for clients, which they want,” Bernhardi continued.

“Some of these exceptional events customers talk to us about through the NPS prompt us to refresh these business rules, which I’m pleased to see. And we’ve done that at pace as well,” she said.

More recently, OFX has rolled out Qualtrics’ sentiment measurement feature, which allows it to read customer verbatim through a sentiment lens.

Of course NPS is not looked at in isolation, and scores sit alongside operational data metrics. “We measure operational efficiency at all touchpoints as well, and there’s generally correlation or a prompt to understand it better,” Bernhardi said.

An example is a program of work looking at the conversion funnel for digital acquisitions, with metrics sitting across those touchpoints.

“We know if a customer starts that registration journey, they have some form of intent. Our objective is to get that customer to their goal as quickly and efficiently as possible, so that NPS lens showing how our performance varies, helps us identify what hurdles customers are facing along the way,” she said.  

What’s more, the program has helped OFX put a customer priority lens over what had previously been largely a product-led roadmap driven by industry and competitors.

As part of its wider voice-of-customer efforts, OFX is measuring social, third-party review sites and has an active listening program in-house to support more than 1 million transfers being conducted annually.

“In the spirit of data democracy, we’ve built systems so anyone can listen to client calls at any time… we’re constantly curating these different types of calls,” Bernhardi said.  “Hearing the line of questioning clients have of our teams on the frontline, shows us opportunities for self-service  and is another significant input.”  

Alongside NPS, OFX maintains quality measures on the frontline in terms of client experiences, as well as typical acquisition and conversion metrics, repeat transfer times for existing clients, and the speed clients move from registration to verification and their first transfer.

“We recognise customers have very different needs with international transforms – they might want to do something today or in 90 days,” Bernhardi said. “To us, it has to be the customer meeting their objectives. So we need a number of lenses and because they occur at different timescales, it’s vital to have qualitative measures across the journey.”

OFX prides itself on its strong NPS score of 59, Bernhardi said by way of quantifying success. “The client experience enhancements largely sit on the product itself, but we’ve seen remarkable improvements in our grade of service across phone contact channels,” she said.

“Even though we have aspirations to be digital-first, our clients tells us one of the unique differentiators is we blend the human touch in everything we do.

“The sentiment tool has allows us to see the dial move quite materially on that phone client experience, which has been interesting to see and fabulous for the frontline teams to have a qualitative measures to look at, rather than just traditional measures.”   

The next step is extending the NPS program to corporate channels, and Bernhardi said the team had set hefty goals to improve the corporate channels including alliance partnerships.

“It’s a very different client interaction and journey, so we’ll take it slowly and mindfully, as it will inform the investments in the next financial year,” she said.  

While corporate journey mapping is still in its infancy, learnings from the client side will again help OFX to build a strong VOC program, Bernhardi said. That is expected to go live in the next six weeks.

“We’ll watch it closely and see where the opportunities beyond that,” she added.

Read more about how other brands are tackling voice of customer:

Follow CMO on Twitter: @CMOAustralia, take part in the CMO conversation on LinkedIn: CMO ANZ, join us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/CMOAustralia, or check us out on Google+:google.com/+CmoAu   



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