Ways to Win: How a Major Bank Gained a Competitive Edge Through Better Benchmarking
A major U.S. banking institution had been partnering with The DRG on customer experience work when a broader question emerged: How do we measure up – product by product, journey by journey – against our competitors?
While syndicated research had offered glimpses into certain products and select moments of the experience, leaders were still left with an incomplete, fragmented view. They needed something deeper and more comprehensive: a way to capture customer feedback across the full end-to-end experience and across their most important competitors.
At the same time, the bank was feeling mounting pressure around retention. Leaders wanted clarity on where they were lagging, which experience drivers mattered most to customers, and which strategic levers would move satisfaction – and loyalty – in the right direction.
They had partnered with a large consulting firm to begin this work, but the approach didn’t deliver what they needed. Knowing the value of the relationship and the quality of past work, the bank turned to The DRG to take over and redesign the program from the ground up – preserving what worked while elevating everything else.
banking
The Solution
The challenge here was clear: build a comprehensive, multi-product competitive benchmarking program capable of informing strategic decisions across the entire organization.
The DRG developed and now manages a robust, enterprise-wide competitive benchmarking program for the bank. The program includes three key components:
1. A comprehensive, multi-product design
To provide a full view of competitive performance, we capture feedback across key consumer and small-business products:
- Consumer: checking, credit card, mortgage, wealth/investment, home equity, and personal loan
- Small business: business checking, credit card, lending, and merchant services/payments
Each product includes a tailored survey path to reflect the nuances of the experience, supported by large annual sample sizes: 30,000+ consumer responses and 5,000+ small-business responses. Separate competitive sets ensure meaningful, product-specific comparisons.
2. Clear KPIs and the right depth of insight
The program centers on two critical measures: overall product satisfaction and journey satisfaction. These metrics help the bank understand what customers value most, how they compare them to competitors, and where opportunities exist to close gaps across the broader journey. KPIs are regularly revisited to ensure they remain relevant and impactful over time.
3. Deliverables built for decision-making
Because the survey spans products, channels, journeys, and touchpoints, insights flow to teams across the organization. Deliverables include:
- KPI dashboards housed within an experience platform
- Deep-dive reports on specific competitors or priority topics, synthesizing benchmarking results with internal research and market intelligence
- Ongoing flexibility to add or adjust content in response to new initiatives or business needs
- Specialized tools and ad-hoc analyses that help leaders quickly translate insights into action
This structure ensures leaders – from product to CX to channel marketing – receive the intelligence they need to make informed, data-driven decisions.
The Wins
The benchmarking program has become a strategic asset for the bank, informing decision-making across product lines and leadership levels. Over time, it has evolved to not only diagnose gaps but also guide strategy, messaging, and experience design across the enterprise. Here are some key wins:
Sharper prioritization of retention and customer experience efforts: With visibility into the key drivers of satisfaction and where gaps exist, teams can focus investments where they will have the greatest impact. To support this prioritization, The DRG built a tailored calculator tool that helps leaders pinpoint which experience improvements will most effectively close competitive gaps. Using driver importance and competitor comparisons, the tool identifies high-leverage opportunities – helping teams take a more strategic, targeted approach to closing the distance with key competitors.
Deeper competitive intelligence for product, digital, and channel teams: Regular deep-dive analyses into specific competitors or products – such as checking account comparisons or journey-level assessments – enable teams to understand precisely where competitors are outperforming and why. These findings inform:
- Product refinement and feature prioritization
- Digital experience enhancements
- Branch and contact center support improvements
- Messaging around experience strengths or white space opportunities
This ongoing intelligence also helps the bank stay ahead of shifts in the marketplace and continuously refine its offerings.
Insights that inform marketing and value proposition development: When marketing teams need to understand how competitors position key offerings, they can turn to the benchmarking program for fast insights. For example, an ad-hoc Merchant Services value proposition report enabled the bank to sharpen its creative strategy by uncovering:
- How competitors talk about their solutions
- What tools and features small businesses prioritize
- How the bank’s products and journeys compare in perception and performance
These types of insights help the bank’s marketing teams more effectively articulate differentiated value rooted in real customer expectations and competitive realities.
A flexible, evolving program that supports new initiatives: The benchmarking program is designed to flex with the bank’s changing priorities. When new initiatives surface or leadership needs fast clarity on an emerging topic or business challenge, The DRG can quickly synthesize insights across benchmarking data, internal research, and competitive intelligence to produce focused, topic-based reports. These analyses help leaders explore timely questions, understand marketplace shifts, and shape in-flight strategies. The program also supports facilitated strategy sessions that translate findings into concrete next steps – ensuring teams always have access to relevant, actionable intelligence as their needs evolve.
Most importantly, the bank now has a decision-enabling, enterprise-scale competitive insight system – one that adapts with the business and continually strengthens the bank’s ability to retain customers, differentiate in the market, and sustain long-term competitive advantage.
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