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Macquarie Bank's payoff from merging customer and employee experience into one

Bank's people and client officer shares how it focused on employee engagement and behaviour and took on a collaborative approach to decipher client insights

Macquarie Bank’s decision to merge client experience (CX) with employee experience (EX) into one function has proven a landmark move that’s accelerated the bank’s customers capabilities and bolstered internal engagement.

Overall, the process started with a view on culture and discovering how to change the way employees thought and behaved, Macquarie Bank head of people, culture and client experience, Rosalind Coffey, told attendees at the Forrester CX Sydney 2018 event.

“The brands deliver the promise, but the employees actually deliver the experience itself,” Coffey said. “Where employees are more engaged, the experience of the clients is reportedly better.

“There’s this convergence of CX and EX and we’re starting to see more roles at a senior level in organisations encompass both sides of that equation as a result. We’re taking the people and culture out of the fluffy stuff and into hard metrics for organisations and higher results.”

Coffey said Macquarie Bank recognised it needed to start the convergence process from a “virtuous cycle” mindset. The ambition was to drive loyalty and advocacy in client groups, as well as drive loyalty and advocacy in the employee base.

The first step was uniting EX and CX four years ago. Coffey was previously head of employee experience.

“Our goal at that time was to shift our organisation, lift our organisation and build a high performance culture and high performance organisation,” she said. “We set about a new strategy that was clearly articulated and to which everything else we did was aligned, and we focused on making sure every employee in our organisation understood the role they played, personally, in delivering that strategy.”

The introspective process involved looking at the leadership team and capabilities of its managers. “If you’re going to multiply this, it can’t just happen from the centre. Positivity has to be happening in people’s lives each and every day,” Coffey continued.

Another shift was enterprise agility and fostering more employee empowerment and enablement. This was about delivering faster and quicker decisions so there was less bureaucracy. Driving employee lift and engagement was also done in terms of diversity and inclusion.

“The purpose of that was not just to shift our demographics, it was to drive a culture where diversity of thought was normal,” Coffey said. “So we could hear different ideas, where people felt psychologically safe to raise objections, to raise concerns, to bring crazy thoughts and to bring ‘out there’ thinking into our organisation.”

With these initial steps in place, the bank then took an organisation-wide approach to blending the benefits of its improved employee engagement and how that factored in with the client experience.

“We had to think about how we create this change in our organisation in the absence of a really massive CX team,” she said. “We had a total of four people whose role it was to solely focus on the client experience, and we have 2500 people. And off that base of four, we’ve made some pretty big shifts.”

A big step was focusing on client journeys and deploying a journey team to deliver findings. “We did a deep dive into actual customer journey mapping and with that we taught very quickly about ethnographic research, about pain points, about ‘moments of truth’- all of the CX capability stuff. We taught them not in a classroom, but we taught them through doing,” Coffey said.  

A collaborative team, which could include a member of the consulting team, a technical person, and an operations person, then interviewed clients and partners about how they worked and lived their lives.

“Our salesforce out in front of clients everyday said, ‘I had no idea that’s what people thought’,” Coffey said. “Operations functions were getting feedback from the back offices of some of our clients and were amazed with the findings.

“These are people deeply experienced in their functions who deeply care about their clients who gained a completely different perspective. What we were able to do then was use those people as our advocates and champions of client experience methodology throughout the organisation.”

In addition to the customer journey map, the bank developed an internal processing systems map underneath it so people could see all of the “spaghetti”. “The more tangled the spaghetti, the more little sad faces happened on the client experience map,” Coffey said.

Throughout this journey experience, Macquarie Bank made connections and found common ground in terms of the customer.  

“Like most organisations, we had very capable and very siloed individual teams all doing wonderful work, but not talking to each other a great deal,” Coffey explained. “We would have a tech team, a sales team, a business management team, an operations team, a marketing team - and they all cared about what they were doing, but we weren’t joining the dots.

“Through this journey capability, we were actually able to bring together this cross-functional team that just gave it a shot. We realised we don’t have to work like this together, we don't even have to change reporting lines, and you can even sit in your same desk. But for the purposes of this customer journey, let’s come together and see what we can do together. And let’s line up our functions on that journey.”

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