Banco Guayaquil, the most progressive bank in Ecuador, has always focused on continuous improvement.  The bank serves over 2 million customers at more than 7,000 banking locations and has been at the forefront of digital transformation to meet the needs of its customers who expect to access to banking 24/7.   The bank recognized the worldwide trend to prioritize customer experience and, in 2018,  launched Proyecto Centrico, or “Project Centric.” This five-year strategic plan aims to improve the customer experience at all levels. For the first time, the bank has CX goals as part of its strategic plan.

Problem: Lack of actionable insight into the customer experience

Customer experience was now a key pillar of the bank’s strategy and Jorge Hurtado, as head of the customer experience, was tapped to modernize Banco Guayaquil’s approach to listening, learning, and acting on customer feedback. The bank’s dated customer feedback program was based on phone surveys and did not provide timely or actionable insights. Jorge sought to redeploy that budget and build a modern CX program that would scale and become part of the organization. He chose Wootric as a technology partner to help him develop a plan that would deliver actionable feedback and engage the broader organization.

Solution: Real-time NPS, CSAT, and CES feedback across the customer journey

Banco Guayaquil used Wootric’s Listen, Learn, Act framework to simplify and guide the development of a sophisticated CX program.

Listen: Right question, right time, right channel means hearing from more customers. 
Wootric helped Jorge determine all relevant interactions and select the right questions to ask. Over the course of six months, Wootric began capturing feedback at eight different touchpoints using in-app and email surveys. The program uses NPS, CSAT, and CES microsurveys exclusively to understand the experience on the bank’s website, mobile app, support interactions, and branch visits. “With Wootric, you can ask only those three things, and trust me, that is a good thing because it focuses you on three questions that are tried and tested,” says Jorge. “Response rates are well over 15% and we get good feedback comments, too. This was a nice surprise.”

Learn: Insight from machine learning
The scores and feedback comments go into Wootric, enriched with customer data from Microsoft Dynamics, Banco Guayaquil’s CRM.  This makes it possible to filter responses and analyze in ways that are useful to more departments including customer support. Machine learning auto categorizes topics and sentiment in customer comments. “Our comments are in Spanish, but we started using Wootric instead of manually tagging because it was quite effective. As we monitor topics over time,  we can see that the strategies applied to solve those problems are actually reducing the number of comments related to that specific topic.”

Act: Facilitating shared accountability
Wootric helps teams stay accountable for closing the loop with customers. “For example, the business banking team has a process where they go through the comments, they see which company the comment is from and contact the customer, and leave a note in Wootric saying, ‘Okay, this was solved’.”

Results: Project Centric comes alive

Banco Guayaquil’s CX program was implemented in under eighteen months and, notably, did not require additional investment in services. Jorge gives four tangible examples of the program’s impact to date: 

• Empowering the C-Suite. The C suite and top executives meet monthly to review data, trends, comments, and progress on CX initiatives. “This has been extremely helpful, I highly recommend it because it gives the CX program the importance it deserves.”
• Improved branch experience. All branch managers use the Wootric platform and are responsible for the branch’s CSAT score. A manager can easily filter responses to see their score and comments related to their branch. They know if they’ve improved, or what problems they need to solve. They can see other branch scores and overall CSAT too, and understand if they are above average or below average on satisfaction. “Just making it visible, accessible went a long way. Just saying hey, you need to work on this. Everyone was extremely motivated. So that has been highly successful.”
• More effortless digital customer experience. The UX team now builds customer experience improvements into the roadmap.  “Customer feedback is an infinite source of suggestions, bugs — whatever you need to optimize a new digital product you will find in Wootric feedback.”
• Primero Tú (“You First”) campaign turns the internal efforts into a public commitment to customer experience. This campaign features real customers and the feedback they have given via Wootric surveys. “In TV, print, and billboards our customers are saying things they like about us, as well as things they want us to change.  This marks the next milestone in the CX project — a public commitment to listen and evolve. In one ad a customer says, ‘Online banking is great. Keep it that way.’  This is important. It’s going to be tempting to focus only on the problems, but you have to pay attention to the positive things people are saying. You have to build upon that.”