David Lengen podcast transcript

Interview with David Lengen of Citi and Egg

In the third of our ‘…on Customer Experience’ podcast series, we talked to David Lengen, Head of eBusiness for Citi and Egg.
In the interview he discusses Citi’s approach to customer experience, how they measure and score their efforts internally and, when it’s important to maintain a UK focus vs a global focus.

Speaker key:

CMC: Clare Mitchell Crow
DL: David Lengen

CMC: Hi, I’m Claire Mitchell Crow from Foviance, and welcome to our third on Customer Experience podcast. This podcast was recorded in April 2009. There’s a great deal of talk about customer experience in the business world right now, as traditional sources of differentiation are quickly disappearing, brands are realising that it is the overall customer experience offered that can really set them apart. For those organisations that can reorient themselves around the customer, the opportunity is significant, generating customer loyalty, increasing brand equity and advocacy, and capturing market share, but becoming a truly customer-centric organisation is not without its challenges. The on Customer Experience podcast series is a set of regular interviews with senior figures from some of the world’s most respected businesses, focusing on the strategic importance of customer experience. We’re hoping through these podcasts to shed some light on the way some organisations manage the customer experience.

Today I’m joined by our third guest interviewee, David Lengen, eBusiness Manager for Citi. David, we really appreciate you taking the time to talk with us today.

DL: OK.

CMC: First of all, can you tell us a little bit about your background, the organisation you work for, Citi, and your current role?

DL: I started my career in the United States in accounting, I have a degree in accountancy. I started working at Price Waterhouse, and was looking to pursue a career in finance. Then over the course of my career, I’ve discovered the internet, and during the dot.com years decided that that was the career I wanted to pursue. Since then, I have been working in a mobile phone company in Canada and also here in the UK at the Royal Mail as the Customer Experience Manager for online, and now I’m the head of eBusiness here at Citi in the UK, where I look after the range of online experience, from the acquisition of new customers from prospect generation, including search and affiliates and online display and getting into now Web 2.0 type activities, through to conversion, so I look after content management and customer experience, design, to service, online servicing for customers, so I also have a team that looks after our online banking functionality for both the CitiBank and the Egg brands, so it’s really a broad remit, and I’m very happy to have it, because I get to follow the customer from the point at which we first communicate with them and they become a prospect, all the way through that conversion process, and then once they become customers as a service proposition. Apart from that I also have a web analytics team, and I have some project management channel developers who are kind of our liaison to technology, so it’s kind of a broad remit, but I enjoy it.

As you know, Citi is one of the largest global financial institutions, not quite as big as we were lately, but still one of the largest, and we operate in, I don’t know how many countries, but in every corner of the globe, and here in the UK obviously not one of the major players, we operate a branch network of five branches in the UK, so for all intents and purposes on the CitiBank brand we are roughly, for the most part, an online bank, and of course for the Egg brand, which we acquired in 2007, entirely an online proposition, we do do some phone banking, because customers do still like to call on the phone, but predominantly an online operation as well, so again in the UK, a small player, but almost entirely using online channels.

CMC: OK, thank you. If we step back, previously you were at Royal Mail, where you worked with Foviance. Can you talk a little bit about a few of the benefits that partnership brought, whether they were internal or customer facing?

DL: We did a lot of work with Foviance at Royal Mail, and it was a very good partnership, I would call it, we obviously did usability testing and made quite good use of the lab, and it happened to be in very close proximity, so it was very easy for us to make it down there, but also in addition to the usability testing, we had worked on a framework, a usability framework, with Foviance, which was, we found to be quite beneficial, which was kind of a rolling programme of usability reviews that didn’t just involve testing, but also kind of management consulting and we looked at our analytics together, and understood where potential issues were, so we could proactively address them also reactively in some cases. We worked on the Royal Mail site redesign, which was award-winning, and in no small part thanks to Foviance, and finally I think my favourite project that we worked on with Foviance was the registration and database alignment, we challenged Foviance to look at our registrations to the website, and we had about four or five different layers from just an email newsletter all the way through to some of the applications like SmartStamp, or transactional applications, and we realised we had so many organically grown registration processes before the different brands, Royal Mail, Post Office, Parcelforce, and so what we were looking to do was align those, and so first the engagement was just a usability review of the processes, but then as we got to working with the team, we started to realise that we had a much bigger problem in that we hadn’t designed our applications, our data capture strategy very well, so we kind of took a few steps back, and we expanded the remit, and we asked Foviance, we challenged Foviance, to do something they had never done before, which was to help us almost design our database structure and scheme around how we captured our customer data across our different brands for different purposes and different applications, and what we got was a really nice output that we were able to use in our application design, so we were able to say, at what point in these processes do we want to capture what kind of information, so we’d have core information, and the next layer, we’ll start with email and general registration, then we’d go to personal information, then the next layer would be transactional information, and so it really helped us, and our application designers, to streamline what we were doing, and it became more of a living document as opposed to, had we just asked Foviance to do a usability review of five registration processes, they would have done a good job of that, but then it would have aged from the moment they delivered their result; this became a living document that we could constantly refer back to, and say, how should we handle this new process, and so that was my favourite project that we worked on together, it added a lot more value than any of the other things that we had done, it was great.

CMC: OK, thanks David. That probably leads nicely to my next question, because talking about the registration process makes me think of customer experience, because thinking about how many times a customer maybe has to register and what they’re faced with on the Royal Mail screens, but if we now look at your current role at Citi, can you tell us a bit about how important the customer experience is for Citi?

DL: Yes, one of the things that I realised when I came to Citi, before we purchased Egg, was that customer experience hadn’t been taken very seriously, and in service of sales, just getting things up on the website, just to promote the products, but having my eyes opened when we got to look at the Egg brand and the business itself was a complete opposite approach, where customer experience for the Egg brand was hugely important to the company, and really what made it such a good value for Citi was to take those learnings and really ingrain them into the wider culture for the UK business, which we’ve done, I believe, and have been able to begin to have that effect on the CitiBank brand and what we do online for Citi. I don’t know about other banks in the UK, but I’m doubtful that there are many banks, if any, in the UK that actually staff up design experience managers, so these are digital experience designers with backgrounds in wireframe development and persona creation and all that sort of thing; that kind of skill set doesn’t generally exist within a financial organisation. We also have a team of usability experts, we have a lab at the Egg offices in Derby, which has the one-way mirror, it’s all fully kitted up, and with eye tracker software, and we use it frequently, and so again I don’t know about other banks in the UK, but I would imagine that they don’t take user experience quite as seriously, or enough to bring it in house.

CMC: So you mentioned that since you’ve acquired Egg, you’ve taken some of those learnings, or it’s spreading across the Citi group – can you talk a little bit more about how things have changed, maybe a specific story?

DL: Well, one of the things that we’re doing now is, we’ve kind of integrated the two businesses, so we’d have a single team looking after obviously the web, and we’d have a single team looking after all products now, so we have the same people selling the Egg card as sell the Citi branded credit cards, so as we integrate, it’s just been a natural integration of the processes as well, so for example within technology one of the things that we implemented in the past year was a usability framework for all application development that comes through, so this had always existed at Egg, and so when ever a project manager was put on a new application, web build, they would ensure that the digital experience design team had a proper place in the programme plan, project plan, and that the usability testing had an appropriate space to iterate the results. Now that we are one single organisation, obviously now all projects go through that technology funnel, so whenever a Citi development project would take place, it will also pick up that same process and these kinds of things will get done within.

The other thing that I’ve created this year or last year was, within the usability framework we have, we looked at the process that all applications go through before we launch them, and we looked at kind of the touch points where we believe a usability review, whether it just be heuristic, or whether it be a full blown test, where at the stages of development we think we need to engage, so we’ve come up with three, one was the initial heuristic review of the designs, second was the preliminary on wireframes, we bring some customers in, and the third is prior to release, a little bit closer to release, we’d have another round.

Then at each stage of the development we’ve created what we call a good usability seal of approval, once the usability team have a review of the screens and the work, they will assign a rating to the project itself, so we’ve got anything from a green down to a red, and I think there are four stages – yellow, orange, red, and once the rating is assigned to the project, if it would be an orange or a red, it needs to get escalated in order to proceed without having the fixes, generally we require the fixes to be made, but if it’s an orange or a red, they must be made, or you must get an exception from a higher board member, so that was kind of a fun way to embed a usability mentality into the business and a good customer experience mentality, because you find now that the culture is, the project managers are actually kind of pulling for a green rating, they begin to want to make a project green or yellow at worst, it’s taking something that sometimes project managers don’t necessarily like, because that takes their timescales, good customer experience and user experience sometimes pushes timescales, so we try to turn it into something a little bit more fun for the organisation, so that’s been successful so far.

CMC: Excellent, thank you. Now, you mentioned that Citi has headquarters in the US, obviously has a global presence, you’re not one of the biggest in the UK, but obviously have to look out for the UK market. Can you tell us a little bit about how you deal with localisation?

DL: That’s a tough question, and it’s a sensitive question, because we haven’t necessarily gotten it right yet. With the budget constraints that most organisations, including banks these days, especially banks these days, are facing, there’s a real drive to consolidating suppliers, and so what you’re doing is you’re hearing from region, why can’t we use a global partner who does a great job of let’s say affiliate sales in eastern Europe or western Europe, why can’t we just tap into that? Why do we you need a unique supplier for the UK? And so it’s a constant education and negotiation, I think, because we’re experiencing that now with, for example with SEO, we want obviously the best SEO company, and we’re under pressure for other various reasons, for most of the cost reasons, to use a different supplier, so it’s showing, I think the key is to show the unique value that a local supplier can provide. On the good side, with the purchase of Egg, and all of the good stuff that’s there for us to learn from, we have been able to export that to other countries, so I happen to think that some of the modelling that we do on our acquisition activity, through the line acquisition activity, we do some fairly sophisticated econometric modelling on how we acquire and how we spend our marketing money, and there’s a lot of countries that could really benefit from, what, seven/eight years of data that went into that model, that we can teach other countries around the globe to use, to optimise their web experience and their sales activity.

CMC: OK, how do you measure the customer experience that you offer, in terms of Egg’s obviously online, and you mentioned there’s a call centre – I don’t know whether you could talk a little bit about that, you’ve obviously got two channels going there, do you have measurements in place between the two?

DL: We do, obviously we use our analytics to understand whether we’ve got any drop off points and so abandonment rates and click through rates and conversion rates are analytic ways that we measure; we also do more subjective surveys and things, we have a constant running online email survey that customers participate in, and we get a lot of great feedback from that, and we kind of set our targets and we look to see whether or not we’re achieving our targets for satisfaction regarding, we do net promoter scores – would you recommend?, we do flat customer satisfaction surveys on how easy was it for you to find the information, and also behind our security, how easy was it for you to transact today, so we do some customer surveys.

We also, as a financial institution, are regulated obviously by the FSA and they give us a set of measurement criteria called treating customers fairly, TCF, and so there are six TCF principles against which all financial institutions in the UK must satisfy, and so we’ve taken TCF very seriously, I have to say, regarding our organisational structure, it was embedded through every level of the organisation to ensure that these six factors against which the FSA are looking are completely embedded in what we do, and what TCF really does is, it looks at, from the design of your products to how you communicate and deliver those products, and how you measure after the sale whether or not those products are appropriate for the customer, and how satisfied they are with the product they purchase, so it’s from end to end, but mostly around how we communicate and do our products that we offer do what they say they do, and were they sold to the customer properly. So again, six criteria in order to measure that, and we’re very very strict about how we, everything we do we test against the TCF six guidelines to ensure that we’re not only compliant, but also doing right by our customers.

So I’d have to say that our UK Country Head has spearheaded this, and very passionate about it, I think one of your questions was around organisational structure, and he’s created a role for TCF on the board, and also we have in every single individual in the UK in our objectives, performance objectives, we have a TCF measure in our performance reviews, so to his credit, when the country head joined the business last year, he was very adamant about making this, ingraining this in the culture here, so it started off as kind of ticking the box, it’s OK, we have to do this, but it actually has ended up being much more part of the culture, and people don’t mind it so much.

CMC: People are happy! That was going to be one of my questions just about the customer experience in the organisation, but I think between the answer you’ve given me about your role and what it covers and what activities you’re doing.

DL: Well, I can add also that it’s shared between a few people, like I mentioned, the Country Head’s very supportive of customer experience, and everything that we try to do in my team, which is very helpful. Also creating the role for the TCF Head. It’s also shared, I mean obviously everybody shares customer experience accountability, but also the Chief Marketing Officer, who I line into, and also we have a Head of Client Care, who mostly looks after non-digital channels, but the phone and IVR as well, and so I would say that that’s kind of the team that looks after customer experience, and we also have, under the Client Care Director, we have a Customer Experience Head, who looks at again end-to-end customer experience, which we as digital managers also kind of participate in.

CMC: Feed into?

DL: So we look at that forum, although it does often, the time spent there often does start from issues, live issues and complaints, but we also do get to do some strategic work as to say how are we servicing customers in general through all of our channels.

CMC: OK, excellent. Do you feel your organisation competes on the basis of customer experience?

DL: Competes? – yeah, certainly for Egg, I can say that that’s a brand that I think represents well the intended brand values, being simple and offering value to customers and fair. Certainly the simple mantra is pervasive, I think, if you’ve ever visited the Egg website or have used Egg. I have to say it’s one of the easiest, I obviously have lots of accounts at different banks just in my role, I have to do, and I would say objectively, as objective as I can be, I do think that the Egg experience is quite easy to use, and has always been since the day it was founded, and so yes, I would. On the CitiBank side, I think we’ve got some ground to cover before we are “competitive” in the area of customer experience. I don’t think it’s awful, but I do think we’ve got a lot more work to do on the Citi brand than we would on the Egg.

CMC: OK. And you hint at work to do – is that directly based on feedback from customers? – or is that internal?

DL: I think that’s my opinion more than anything, but no, surprisingly we get, you get some really surprising responses back when you do your net promoter surveys and satisfaction surveys, things that you would never have expected customers to have problems with, they have problems with, and vice-versa – things that you think are absolutely horrible, they don’t think it is quite at all, so you just really never know, so you do have to keep looking at these subjective measures, but yeah, in some ways Citi surprises me, it surpasses what I would estimate as a good experience, but in other ways customers have validated that we’ve got a long way to go in some areas.

CMC: In terms of managing the experience, you spoke about different people that pull together that you say would make up managing the customer experience from marketing and yourself, and others – are there any key challenges you can think of when you’re looking at that?

DL: Organisationally? – challenges organisationally, no, I think when, basically when you’ve been given the directive from the top, when the country manager is telling you this is something that I believe in strongly, and I want all of you to believe in strongly, and he’s passionate about it, then I think everyone kind of just forgets all of the, OK, well is that your responsibility or my responsibility? There’s some of that, and I think we organisationally have finally come to a place where we understand now if something goes wrong, if there’s a complaint or a live issue, who is the one to call to resolve it, if it’s more strategic I think we’ve got a great steering committee now that looks strategically ahead to understand where we want to be, how we want our channels to work together, how we segment our customer base and how we want to do business with them, and how they want to do business with us, and so organisationally I don’t think that’s the biggest challenge, I think with regards to the key challenges for customer experience now, I would have to say more towards investment, the times are tough right now, and finding funds to invest in things like this is a bit more of a challenge than it might otherwise be, so that’s a bit of a challenge in the current economic environment, I think.

CMC: OK, and finally, my last question was, who do you think offers a great customer experience, in your opinion?

DL: This one’s a tough one for me always, so many different sites offer some things that are great and some things that are not, without being too cliché I would say Apple, in the fact that they created a brand, is a brand that people can aspire to be like, and a lifestyle, but just the way they tied in the hardware with the marketplace and all the Apps that you have available to you, and all of the music that you can easily download, I think that they probably were the most strategic and clever of all of the brands that I could imagine in the last two or three years or three years that they’ve been doing this, so yeah, anyway it’s a cliché but I still would have to say Apple, if you ask me.

CMC: Great, well thanks very much for your time today, it’s been great talking to you and talking about the customer experience at Citi.

DL: Thank you.

CMC: Thank you.

DL: With pleasure.

CMC: And thanks to you all for listening. Please do come back to Foviance.com shortly to download our next podcast in our on Customer Experience series.

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