CO-OP Bank

The Challenge

The Coop bank differentiates itself from others in UK banking by positioning itself as ‘the ethical bank.’ Research showed that whilst customers recognised environmental endeavours, there was little connection with everyday banking. A noticeable omission was a framework to inform colleagues across branches, operations, and marketing of how to achieve this.

The Approach

Lexden got to work on developing a set of customer standards to create a framework for colleagues across the bank to design improvements, and fix issues against to deliver a consistent experience for customers.

To achieve this, we interviewed many customers representing all types. The resulting insights were crafted into several customer standards. Each one highlighted how it connected to the values of the bank. We then worked with the functions to identify 3 examples from each area demonstrating the bank were already living-up to their standards, some of the time. Importantly, we articulated for colleagues how you employ customer standards to reflect their functional business areas, to ensure they were perceived relevant.

Before rolling-out the ‘making a difference everyday’ programme we validated the customer standards with the customers who confirmed this was a bank they were proud to be associated with.

We ran a programme of workshops across the many functions and branches of the bank, with groups of ten to two hundred. During the workshops we used our CX game to engage colleagues to understand how they contributed, and the distinction created when they designed improvements to the customer standards.

Outcomes

All colleagues were engaged in the Customer Standards programme.

A ‘Making a Difference Everyday’ matrix captured new improvements developed in line with the Customer Standards. This allowed the customer experience team to monitor the strategic and enterprise scale of improvements.

Several new banking propositions arrived, inspired by the freedom of the Customer Standards.

HR adopted the programme to ensure further onboarding of new staff and measurement of colleague commitment across the staff satisfaction survey.