Balancing human and digital: TNEX
David Jiménez Maireles, the Chief Experience Officer of TNEX, shares his expertise on delivering exceptional customer experiences in the digital banking landscape.
David Jiménez Maireles, Chief Experience Officer of TNEX, shares insights into the challenges and strategies involved in delivering exceptional customer experiences in the digital banking landscape, in an interview for the Qorus-Avanade report titled Balancing human and digital: Are banks losing touch with customers?
What are your roles and responsibilities in the bank?
As a Chief Experience Officer, I am responsible for overseeing and managing the overall experience that customers, employees and stakeholders have with TNEX. I am responsible for developing and executing strategies that enhance the overall experience and satisfaction of customers and employees, resulting in increased loyalty, retention and revenue.
What is your top customer challenge right now?
Ensuring our customer experience (CX) matches our customers’ expectations. In the last few years, there has been a dramatic change in the way customers are engaging with banks and the products they use.
Young customers are ditching traditional banking products for new digital versions. Usually more flexible, personalized and tailored to each customer's unique needs and preferences. When saving money, customers have replaced term deposits with saving pots and round-ups. Instead of using traditional wealth managers to invest in funds and shares, new customers have opted for robo-advisors or digital wealth platforms to buy fractional shares. Instead of using a credit card when buying things online, young customers are opting for Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL) solutions.
All these changes keep me alert and remind me of the power of delivering new customer experiences on digital channels. I keep reviewing customer data to identify pain points and opportunities for improvement in our products and services and implementing new features that help customers daily. This is why one of our first recruits for the CX team was a psychologist. I needed to know how our customers are thinking before developing new products.
Also, I decided to partner with a gaming company to co-develop our mobile app. We have used a lot of techniques from games to keep customers engaged. Most of our customers play games daily. Therefore, we have translated some of the experiences they have when playing to delight their banking experiences.
How do you decide the balance between human contact and digital interaction for your retail banking customer segments?
TNEX is a digital-only bank and therefore, the majority of our customers’ touchpoints are done through digital channels. However, there are a couple of human contacts where we strive to deliver an outstanding customer experience.
Can you give an example of where your approach has created a distinctive service?
The Welcome Pack to deliver debit cards. Most banks send customers an envelope with a debit card, plus a letter with the T&Cs to explain what the next steps are to activate the card before using it. For TNEX, we use this moment to delight them. Instead of sending ‘just’ the debit card, we explain what the main features are, and where they can use it, and we attach some stickers to decorate their card, laptop or helmet. Many of them send pictures of other banks’ debit cards with our TNEX stickers on them. Also, we have developed a CX that allows customers to use the debit card as soon as they receive it without compromising security.
Do customers ever get lost in the process or experience lower levels of service?
Sometimes. But we have multiple processes in place to ensure we identify when things like this happen. We monitor every single customer touchpoint when they use the app, we track what customers are saying on social media or why they are calling our customer care team. On a weekly basis, a cross-functional team sits together to share all this information and discuss how we can improve the experience. This helps us review the initiatives we are working on and the new ones that require attention.
Every product and feature built on TNEX has been co-designed with our customers. We run an extensive number of workshops, interviews and focus groups to ensure we develop products our customers need or demand.
Do you think there are limits to what banks can do by focusing on digital only, or are the benefits much greater than the disadvantages?
Absolutely. Time after time we have seen how customers are more prone to use new technology. ChapGPT just needed five days to reach 100 million customers. Younger generations are embracing new technology faster than ever before. But not only that, older generations are using it too when they realize how convenient, easy, and simple it is.
The definition of human interaction will be redefined in the next few years. Why should customers need to visit a branch to know where to invest their money? Or select the most appropriate mortgage based on their individual needs? It’s time for banks to conduct more market research, gather feedback frequently, and start using all customer data collected to gain insights into what their customers want and need from their banking experience.
In the future, how will banks make the most of human engagement? Will such engagement come at an additional cost for the customer or even a premium price?
The number of human engagements will keep decreasing. It will probably be done through digital channels and embedded through multiple platforms. For me, the debate is not about the cost but the value. Customers are willing to pay extra money to brands that offer products and services that bring value to them.
As we enter a recessionary period, banks will be keen to demonstrate a greater understanding of and support for their customers. What initiatives are you taking to appear more human and empathetic? Or are you relying on more automated, contextual responses, based on algorithms and avatars?
Managing their money, tracking expenses, automatic savings rules, and micro-investments. Different generations demand different products and services. Customers are demanding a ‘Spotify’ banking experience. For the very first time, the technology available allows us to raise the bar when offering CX. Based on previous behavior and using machine learning algorithms and artificial intelligence, banks should be able to provide customers with contextual information to help them manage, save, invest, protect, and borrow money. Banking is becoming more and more invisible. It’s there when the customer needs it but most of the time it’s not something you do but something that just happens.
At TNEX we are developing a Customer Data Platform to gather data from different systems and channels to help us identify what every single customer would need at any given point, because our customers’ needs are different on a Monday morning, Thursday evening, or Saturday night. Our aim is to develop an autopilot banking experience. We provide all the context and insights to customers to suggest the next best action based on their unique needs. But we use avatars to guide customers and to make banking products more ‘human’.
Are you developing any partner ecosystems and how are they integrated into the end-to-end customer process? What issues do you typically face? Can you demonstrate the benefits of adopting this approach?
The times when banks were developing everything in-house are gone. When we started TNEX we knew if we wanted to succeed we needed to concentrate on just a few things. Banks need to perform an internal assessment and identify the areas they are good at or want to focus on because of their strategy or strengths. For everything else, they should identify which companies they can partner with to deliver an outstanding customer experience.
When we integrate other products and services from external partners, we prefer to do a full integration. We want to ensure we deliver an incredible CX regardless of the features our customers use. This approach takes longer because our CX team must redesign the whole experience and this requires deeper integration between back-end systems. In our case, the benefits outweigh the disadvantages. We can better control CX by using standard design components and flows. We can improve the conversion rate by monitoring and analyzing customer data.
How do you collect and use customer data to improve the customer experience?
At TNEX we track everything customers do on our app, comments on social media, complaints to our call center or the reviews on Google and Apple Store. The goal is to identify pain points or new patterns that help us improve the overall customer experience. The aim is to reduce the number of clicks to perform any action and suggest the next activity, based on data, that our customers will do.
Our Voice of Customer team gathers all customer data from different teams and systems to find areas for improvement or opportunities for new products and features. By consolidating all this data and working closely with multiple teams we can know what customers are saying and, most importantly, what customers are really doing.
Can you give an example?
When we started to design the transfer screen, we went back to using first principles. Customers are transferring money to friends and family after doing something. But there are some people that you will transfer money to more often. So, we decided to show ‘faces’ instead of bank account numbers and display them bigger or smaller based on the frequency with which the customer transfers money to each of them. A very simple but visual way to use customer data to improve customer experience.
What collaboration tools do you provide for your employees so they can work more effectively on improving customer service?
For me, it was key to develop and implement a customer-centric culture across all departments. I work closely with other departments, such as marketing, sales, product development, and customer service, to ensure that all activities and initiatives are aligned with the organization's overall experience strategy. I put in a lot of effort to create a culture that always prioritizes the needs and preferences of customers. There are two easy ways to scale up a business: offer the cheapest products or develop something different. The goal is to deliver an exceptional experience at every touchpoint, regardless of the channel they use – mobile app, website, social media, or call center.
At TNEX we use multiple tools to improve CX. We use Quicksight to gather and visualize customer data to analyze customer journeys and feature usage. We use Trello to coordinate different projects and campaigns across different teams. We use Figma to design new CX and Notion to track customer feedback during our weekly focus groups and quality interviews.
What issues do you face in adopting technology to manage customer interaction? How have you managed the need for legacy modernization, for example? How are you applying AI and analytics to generate better customer engagement?
Unlike most banks, we don’t start the process by selecting the technology first and then finding a problem that can be solved using it. In our case, we are always looking for new technologies and better processes that can improve the overall experience for customers and employees. Launching a new bank from scratch has allowed us to avoid having any legacy systems we need to modernize or upgrade. We built TNEX as a digital platform that helps us add, change or remove pieces – technology, products, and features – in weeks instead of months or quarters. Our customers’ needs are evolving constantly, and we need to make sure we can adapt our CX to match their expectations.
Thanks to cloud technology we can offer the same quality services anytime and anywhere in real time. The use of artificial intelligence has helped develop a convenient, personal, and contextual CX. The number of services where we use artificial intelligence has grown exponentially. From the onboarding process, reducing the information we require customers to type in and matching ID documents with their faces during the video registration, to estimating their credit scoring to offer an unsecured loan.
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