The Union Bank of the Philippines (UnionBank) recently joined a webinar wherein Chief Customer Experience Officer and Consumer Finance Center Head Ana Delgado talked about how the Bank laid the foundation for a digital ecosystem that will enable it to deliver meaningful experiences to customers. Titled “CX Perspectives Webinar: The Future of Banking and CX,” the webinar took place last September 17.
According to Delgado, one of the first things that UnionBank did in line with this was to review its capabilities in delivering solutions and identify what improvements were needed in providing the experiences that the Bank wanted for its customers. Ensuring that the Bank has all the right building blocks is a key element of this robust digital ecosystem.
“We studied what the business ambitions were and what the customer journeys we want to deliver were and mapped those against the infrastructure and technology we had in place,” Delgado said.
UnionBank also developed an application programming interface (API) marketplace as part of working together with other solutions providers. Through APIs, the Bank wanted to enable third-party providers to integrate its solutions into theirs in a way that is easy and secure, ultimately reducing friction for customers.
“We knew that we would have to work with different companies, different fintechs, and different platforms and we would need to be able to embed our own process and experience there.”
Being adaptive and responsive to the ever-changing digital landscape is also essential when it comes to UnionBank’s goal of providing superior customer experiences. This allows the Bank to not only innovate as needed and to not be afraid to listen to the complaints and ideas of customers, but to also anticipate and build new experiences in a very quick manner, Delgado said.
“In our case, we saw that as we continue to digitize, we would need to become more agile, because that would allow us to respond to both emerging customer needs as well as potential pain points they were experiencing, much faster.”
The most essential component of UnionBank’s customer experience strategy is being customer centric. To do this, the Bank cultivated an organizational culture that puts the needs of customers first in every service provided and any innovation created.
“We used a framework to help people in the company understand what it is we wanted to deliver from a framework standpoint and a principle standpoint.” Delgado said. “We needed to enable the entire organization to understand what it means to be customer centric, so that they would find opportunities within their own spaces to be able to innovate and make changes on their own.”
