On the latest episode of Movers & Shakers, our cofounder and CEO, Dan Michaeli, sits down with Scott Dille, the Director of Client and Partner Experience at Northern Trust, to discuss how design thinking helped reshape the bank’s customer experience.
When asked to define customer experience, Scott said it could be “summed up as simply being mindful of all touch points during the customer journey”. This describes all the ways clients interact with a company, both online and in person, from awareness of the brand up until the first interaction – and so on. Every step in the customer journey should be carefully thought out and given special consideration.
Dille goes on to explain that the best way for a company to know what their customers want is to just ask them. At Northern Trust, they dedicate a lot of time and effort to the voice of the customer, and are genuinely interested in hearing feedback, both positive and negative. Every month, they send out a survey to 1/10 of their customers to see what drives them to be more or less loyal and if a customer is unsatisfied with their experience, a relationship manager reaches out to them within 24 hours to see how they can work together to fix the problem. This approach gives stakeholders evidence of the effectiveness of their impact on client experience by showing them that if they are unhappy with something, they have the power to change it.
Scott and Dan then dive into talking about what design thinking is and Scott describes this concept as a human-centered design where you go straight for the client. When you have deep empathy for your customers and truly understand their pain points, then you will be able to design the right solutions that fix those specific problems. This involves bringing customers into their Client Experience Labs to test solution prototypes, which allows the clients to help co-create the solutions to the problems they are struggling with personally.
The podcast also discusses how their Client Experience Labs came to be and what their plans are for the future. In addition, Scott shares some of the company’s success stories and how everything they do at Northern Trust is centered around the idea that empathy is the most important aspect of a successful customer experience. You cannot have a great customer experience without the combination of great technology and great people, one without the other leaves your customer experience incomplete and potentially broken.
To learn more about how design thinking helped shape the customer experience at Northern Trust, check out our podcast!
