From Vendor to Partner: Transitioning a Flagship CX Program

The Solution

The bank took the first step by identifying “customer loyalty” as their north star metric and starting to track relevant loyalty and supporting metrics to better understand their customers at the relationship level. They rolled out the Loyalty metric as an enterprise-wide KPI, with results slated for quarterly presentations to the Board. However, the bank faced challenges with their current vendor’s limitations and major concerns about transitioning the program to another vendor without data disruption. Even so, the bank needed a long-term partner to refine and optimize their program, think critically and strategically, and create impactful executive-level deliverables. Led by that vision, they took a leap and brought in The DRG to transition their program and evolve it to have the impact they knew it could.

When The DRG joined, we knew it was crucial to transition the program without disrupting tracking or losing existing data and KPI progress. It was also critical that stakeholder needs continued to be met throughout the transition. Our pragmatic approach took all this in stride and included:

• Program Assessment: We first audited existing frameworks, materials, methods, and historical data, collaborating with the incumbent vendor to gather additional details. This helped us to get a sense of trends and progress to-date. As part of the assessment, we also met with the bank’s team and stakeholders to understand their vision and objectives.
• Stakeholder Engagement: We then met with the bank’s team and stakeholders to share our assessment findings and provide recommendations for bridging the existing study with the enhanced program through trending impact consultation.
• Official Transition and Evolution: Finally, we began the program transition and evolution. We identified the need to track end-to-end customer experiences across all touchpoint, product, and brand interactions. Objectives included understanding customer interactions, holistic experiences, competitive comparisons, and the contribution of each experience to overall loyalty and engagement. These objectives would help the bank achieve their overarching goal of determining the best path to improve customer perceptions of and engagement with the bank, to ultimately improve business results.

Our pragmatic approach, combined with proactive communication and transparency, provided the bank with a sense of security that we could help them seamlessly meet their goals.

Throughout the transition, we also closely consulted with the bank and stakeholders to enhance questionnaire design, maximize response rates, create sampling plans, and develop integrated metrics systems, ensuring a comprehensive understanding of the full-scale customer experience and its business impact.

The Wins

The DRG helped the bank transition, formalize, and enhance their customer experience measurement program seamlessly, maintaining data integrity and uninterrupted KPI tracking. The revamped program better met stakeholder needs and supported strategic objectives.

Post-transition, The DRG has continued to work closely with the bank to monitor and assess the program’s success, revisit objectives when necessary, and ensure the program grows with the bank.

Five years later, the program remains successful, driving significant business impact. Story-driven deliverables continue to aid executives in making customer-centric decisions, proving resilient through organizational changes.