Amjad Khan
Senior Customer Experience Manager
HSBC
United Kingdom
Just over 12 months ago, the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority launched an initiative to benchmark all retail banks across the UK on customer service. HSBC came out as number 14 amongst banks, in the bottom quartile of the group.
As a result, HSBC’s executive team set the goal of becoming a top three bank in the UK for CX and service, and as a senior CX manager, Amjad was up for the challenge.
In his initial research, Amjad discovered the bank had too many initiatives in place for focusing on customer service, and that part of his mandate would be to simplify the process.
And after working with an external consultancy firm and HSBC’s executive team, a new strategy was formed in order to adhere to the original goal set out by the bank’s leadership team – meaning a complete change in philosophy and an entire overnight shift in ethos for the retail banking business, to one where the focus would be on having end-to-end customer journey teams. The bank launched this into its strategy as ‘Pivot to Customer’ and eight overall journeys were formed for teams to work around.
Several CX-centric programmes have been launched at HSBC under Amjad’s stewardship, including a Customer in the Room Programme that encourages senior leaders to contact and receive feedback from customers on a regular basis; a voice of employee programme which is held on a hub online encourages all staff to provide feedback and suggestions about ways to help improve the company’s products, services and processes to better support customers; and a closed loop customer feedback programme.
Amjad and his fellow colleagues are already starting to reap the benefits of this major shift in thinking – NPS is up, the Customer in the Room programme has been recognised for industry awards and most importantly, within one year HSBC has risen from being number 14 in CMA rankings to being number 6, not too far from its ambitious top three target.
No longer do we only talk about numbers and metrics as we did before, but really talk about customer and share stories of experiences our customers have had. Coupled with metrics this has helped us to make better and quicker decisions in an agile way.
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