OCTOBER 2023MARTECHOUTLOOK.COM8IN MY OPINIONCHANGING THE GAME: CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE AS THE NEW SOUL OF MARKETINGBy Ron Batisan, Vice President, UnionBankIt was just recent years ago when Union Bank of the Philippines established a Customer Experience Group composed of few Customer Experience Designers and of course a CXO (Chief Customer Experience Officer). The team was formed to address the ever changing needs of our customers making sure that the experiences in each touch-point is well curated and designed according to our customers' lifestyle, values and behavior. It was a tough journey for me as I was assigned to transform the customer experience of our branches. We started with a rigorous research process ­ interviews with our existing customers, focus group discussions, surveys, understanding our own data and benchmarking with other industries not just banks. We did a 360 degree situation analysis. We uncovered so many pain points and these helped us a lot in solving compelling customer issues. We developed a CX framework that will transform the bank's space, processes and most importantly the people. We identified our target market ­ the customers of the future and our existing customers. To be very conservative with this endeavor, we did an experiment first in one of our branches in 2017. So we identified a lab, our biggest branch in Ayala Avenue, Makati City. We called it The Ark simply because it is the banking-equivalent of Noah's Ark. It was envisioned to bring customers to the future of banking wherever it may be. It is a bridge between offline to online. In just 9 months of applying agile project management, The Ark was built and was dubbed as the first fully digital bank branch in the Philippines. It has become UnionBank's award-winning, fully digital and paperless bank branch. Transactions and product applications were digitized and made straight through. This equated to a lot of savings. We called our people Branch Ambassadors as they encompass transaction processing, teaching our customers to use self-service machines and converting our clients to digital via UnionBank Online (Retail), MSME Banking for small businesses and The Portal for large corporations. They have been instrumental in driving our customers to digital channels removing the need to go to our branches for basic bank transactions. And not only that, they have also become our sales force selling insurance products, credit and debit cards, and other bank products and services. The appropriate technology and solutions elevated customer experience by enabling our branches to streamline processes and deliver faster, more efficient services to our clients. The Ark has become a venue for client events as well which we consider a new acquisition and customer engagement touchpoint. With all of these benefits in one branch, the most obvious next step was to replicate these in other branches.Fast forward to 2022 from just one, we are on our way to end the year with 200 Arks all over the Philippines. Use of self-service machines, paperless straight through branch transactions, download of UB Online app, MSME app and The Portal have tremendously grown and have contributed to the bank's bottom line by either adding more customers and growing their Ron Batisan
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