In the digital banking sector, where a range of competitive services are a couple of browser clicks away, establishing and growing a customer base requires more than just online functionality.
To create a competitive edge, Aktif Bank has spent three years developing its customer experience capabilities to go hand-in-glove with its online bank, N Kolay.
“Customer experience is a strategic priority,” Ozgecan Dabanca, CX director with Aktif Bank told Customer Experience Magazine.
Customers are at the heart of its business success
“At the heart of sustainable success lies satisfied customers. Investing in customer experience means not only shaping the present, but also building the future,” he added.
The past three years have been a flurry of activity as the investment bank built its in-house expertise and technology infrastructure to deliver its CX vision, not just for N Kolay, but across all its services.
It also ran an extensive change management programme for its 1,350 employees to help them focus on customer needs
Today, the bank is designing products and processes with customers in mind. “It’s great to see that employees who resisted this change are now advocates of CX,” said Dabanca.
Starting at the beginning
Initial research by Ipsos in 2021 ranked Aktif Bank’s CX maturity level at beginner and identified three key areas for further development. Top of the list was improving its customer interactions, followed by a need to create varying experiences across its service channels.
Lastly, it had to break down resistance within its business units to change.
The CX team, established in late 2021, was tasked with building a customer-focused culture and driving the digital channel NPS value to 45 — the industry average for financial services.
Voice of the customer platform
Vital to driving change was the installation of a voice of the customer platform (Voc) from Pisano in 2023. The software gathers and analyses detailed feedback from the bank’s channels in real time, which enables the bank to spot problems and take rapid action.
“When we receive negative feedback, we promptly reach out to customers and resolve issues quickly,” explained Dabanca.
“This approach ensures that our customers feel valued, not only when they encounter problems, but in every interaction with our bank,” he added.
Pisano has accelerated the shift towards customer-centricity across the bank. Fresh CX data deepens Aktif Bank’s understanding of client behaviour and their journeys.
“We create journey maps with our teams, helping us identify pain points and areas where customers need support,” said Dabanca.
Laying the foundations for change
For much of 2022, (prior to the arrival of the VoC platform, the small CX team laid the foundations for the bank’s customer-first approach. It established a series of committees with senior team leaders that met every quarter.
It also set up regular meetings with process and quality management team leaders, and ran frequent voice of the customer workshops.
In addition, an extensive internal marketing campaign was launched that included newsletters and podcasts to update staff and sow the seeds for the forthcoming CX transformation. This was supported by the CEO and other c-level executives, who recorded videos to outline the importance of CX across the organisation.
A CX Manifesto was published and a group of CX ambassadors were appointed to evangelise the customer-first approach across the organisation.
The ambassadors also played a vital role in customer journey mapping across the bank’s different business units.
An extensive training programme was designed and rolled out to cultivate a customer-first mindset among the rank and file.
“We fostered a customer-focused culture through CX training programmes, VoC platforms and active involvement of our senior management,” commented Dabanca.
Additional CX technology investment
Aktif Bank also invested in speech analytics to proactively identify customer dissatisfaction and “address issues before they arise”, said Dabanca.
The bank acquired Blindlock to boost accessibility for visually impaired customers. It also explored neuromarketing to improve its understanding of the customer.
Technology investment and work to change the organisation’s culture is intended to make “customers feel we are by their side. By prioritising our customers at every step of the process, we aim to build strong connections,” added Dabanca.
Making friends and winning awards
Aktif Bank’s CX strategy has borne fruit. In June 2024, the bank’s maturity ranking shifted from beginner to experienced. It also participated in the Turkiye International Customer Experience Awards in May last year winning two golds.
It then picked up a silver and bronze at the International Customer Experience Awards in November.
NPS value for N Kolary doubled to 51 points during the course of 2023. Digital onboarding for the banking service grew by over 200% during the same time frame.
Plans for 2025 centre around integrating customer satisfaction scores into the organisation via a KPI framework. In practice, this means linking NPS satisfaction scores to employee performance scorecards. “Our goal is to make customer satisfaction a shared responsibility across all teams,” explained Dabanca.
The bank also plans to implement artificial intelligence (AI) tools to further analyse customer feedback.