Identifying Key Moments of Truth in Customer Data

Kailey Raymond: Customer service is key when it comes to maintaining brand loyalty. Take customer complaints, for example. When a customer files a complaint, it's a critical time to act fast and tailor a strategy to that person. Resolving this complaint could be the difference between creating a detractor or converting someone to a loyal customer. ING's Matteo Pomoni has figured out which key moments of truth matter when it comes to brand loyalty. In today's episode, we discuss dos and don'ts of customer obsession, coping with channel competition and how to identify key moments of truth in the customer journey.

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Kailey Raymond: I'm really excited to have Matteo Pomoni here on the show today. He is the Global Head of Retail Daily Banking for ING, joined the company in 2004 and has been with the local retail organization for quite a while now, responsible for daily banking, savings and investment in the retail product line, so super excited to hear all of his wisdom today. Matteo, thanks for joining me.

Matteo Pomoni: Thank you for having me, excited to have good conversation with us about customer experience.

Kailey Raymond: Awesome. Well, Matteo, softball for you to kick off. You've been with ING for quite a while since 2004, but I wanna hear in your own words, what your career journey has been like. How did you get to where you are today?

Matteo Pomoni: Yeah, actually, I joined ING something like 20 years ago in Italy when ING was still called ING DIRECT in Milan and we were, what you call today, kind of a fintech challenging the more established banks. I spent 10 years in ING in Italy and primarily was responsible for all the retail products, and then I'd been asked to join the retail team in Amsterdam. I had different opportunities in Amsterdam and as you mentioned, today I'm responsible for a set of products for two specific center of expertise, which is customer experience and sustainability, which have been defined to be the strategic priorities for our bank. So, I've [0:03:13.0] ____ to both influence and steer, where it really matters for ING.

Kailey Raymond: So, no pressure, just the two strategic initiatives sitting under Matteo right now. We have the man in the hot seat which is great. So, you play a key role, your team plays a key role in the customer experience and the journey. What are some of the programs that your team runs?

Matteo Pomoni: Of course, our job is to steer and inspire, and when it's needed, challenging what actually is happening in the customer experience domain. But the real job, of course is happening locally. So, what we are trying to do is to make sure that we have common guidelines and ambition when it comes to customer experience and then to make sure that we are matching this ambition. But the real job [0:03:56.9] ____ at the end is done now on the ground for the people that is working close to the clients every single day, 10 countries where we have retail operation in place.

Kailey Raymond: That's great. So, what I'm hearing is, there's a lot of differentiation that ING is going to need to create from a local level, I imagine. I'm curious to learn you create omnichannel experiences. Your team on the retail side works with customers in many different markets with many different languages, probably a lot of different preferences. How are you powering those experiences on your team?

Matteo Pomoni: When we look at an organization like ING, as you mentioned, we have different countries with different also engagement models but what we want to make sure is that we are able to deliver a consistent customer experience across all our channels because yes, you already mentioned it, the omnichannel experience is something that customers today expect and demand [0:04:46.9] ____. There are two main elements that match our ambition. The first one is to have a robust set of data that we are able to use in a consistent way across channels. And this is something that seems very obvious, but actually it is not. Because if we look at where we were something like 5-10 years ago, there was a kind of a siloed channel approach that we had completely transformed.

Matteo Pomoni: First, you have to make the data available to all the different channels in a consistent way. The second thing is to make sure that the data protection barriers is higher than before, because it's easier to protect your data when you have assigned the process, when you have this open platform. The other element was that you are able to digest and use your data is to make sure that you have a robust brand identity and this brand identity has to be cascaded and empowering every single employee. And this is not only about the front end employees that speak with the end clients, but it's the full organization because when you have the two things together, the set of data and a strong brand identity, then you can make sure that across all the different channel that your clients will experience a similar powerful customer experience.

Kailey Raymond: You have a lot of incredible little nuggets in there that I wanna dissect. The first one is, you're talking about silos. You're talking about bringing together data from a lot of different channels, multiple different parts of your organization, I'm sure, and making sure you can bring it together in a secure way, that you're abiding, of course, by privacy laws locally in every single one of these countries. A lot of that's a really big challenge for a lot of companies to do. Can you walk me through some of those challenges that you might have on the way to building a omnichannel robust customer experience that ING has?

Matteo Pomoni: There are different challenges. The first one is of course, the IT infrastructure that you need to have because when your legacy is to moving from a siloed, that kind of organization, to an omnichannel organization, you have to completely refresh your IT infrastructure. Make sure that there is one single data source that all the channels would get fed up with, so to make sure that when a client, let's take an example, asks for a mortgage in our app and then visit our branches, the progresses that he has been doing in the app are fully recognized from the front officer in the branch, right?

Matteo Pomoni: And to make this possible, you need to have one source of data that are feeding all the channels. This is a more technological channel, I would say. And there is a cultural and organizational challenge because of course, in a omnichannel experience, you need to make sure that the channels are not competing with each other, but actually are helping and supporting each other. And this is a cultural challenge, but also it's an organizational challenge because if you give siloed targets to every single channel leader, yeah, then you will not have this cooperation in place. They should have crossed targets to make sure that they help and support each other, right? And then they go for the final goal, which is to deliver the best omnichannel experience ever.

Kailey Raymond: That's really interesting. I like that you brought up the idea of channel competition, very complex idea that you're talking about right now. How do you approach that? Are there methodologies in place that you're looking at to understand channel of choice for your customers? How do you make sure that you're delivering that right message to the right person at the right time?

Matteo Pomoni: Yeah, this again comes with data. So, this is a kind of an interesting element that I think is becoming a game changer for every industry. And we're talking about personalizations of the importance to make sure that you're able to deliver digital mainly, personalized experience. That, we believe, is the key game changer and to make sure that this is happening, again, your main partner in crime is your ability to digest, adapt because something that we can learn from a recent experience is that the one fits for all experience that we were delivering in the past is not matching customer expectations anymore. Customer expectations today are different, they expect a personalized tailor experience. They expect that we know their needs and we address their needs properly. And you're not able to do this if you're not able to have the data that help you to recognize what the client is needing for you.

Matteo Pomoni: By the way, personalization is only one of the element about the changing of customer expectation. And I would rather mention two more. The second one is the velocity. Two years ago, deliver, let's say, in my case, a consumer loan in one week, was actually a good experience and the clients would have actually have a positive NPS with this kind of experience. Today, it is not even close to be at par with what the customer are expecting. They want a loan, they want it now. "I want to have an answer from you now." So, instant has become the new normal. And finally, the last element is that clients spend more and more time in what we call the super apps. I can make some example, like Amazon booking. This is where they spend their time, where they take also their financial decisions sometimes. And if you want to become relevant for them, if you want to match their expectations, you need to be there to be able to help them to take the best decision when it really matters. So, personalization, velocity, because instant is the new game and be sure that you are relevant where customers are.

Kailey Raymond: That's really interesting. I live in Brooklyn and any time I walk around, you can see probably no less than like six Amazon trucks just kind of delivering packages, which I'm sure are coming directly from a warehouse right across the river, probably ordered it 10 minutes ago. So, this idea of velocity that you're touching on, I think is really interesting and something that Amazon and others created that need in the market and kind of have been pushing that as a consumer demand and consumers have been learning and pushing other industries to make sure that they can kind of figure that out for them as well, which I think is creating a lot of new, unique, interesting customer experiences in places that we would've never expected. Banking to healthcare, they're all innovating.

Matteo Pomoni: Yeah, it's clear that we are not setting the standards here. You named Amazon, speak about Google. They are actually setting new standards when it comes to digital expectation of our clients and of course, this is also influencing any other industry. Banking is [0:11:22.3] ____.

Kailey Raymond: Definitely not. I like this idea of this connection with these super apps, like being where your customers already are. Can you give me a tangible example of what that might look like with ING?

Matteo Pomoni: Yeah, I can make you an example that is very, very tangible and very recent, actually. So, if you are a client in ING in Belgium, today, you can have up to 11% of discount if you make some purchase on Amazon because we have a specific partnership with Amazon that we are able to track customer behaviors and some specific purchase that they make, some specific items, we are able to provide them with a discount. And this help us, of course, because we have a better NPS with our client because they are happy to have a little bit discount, but this is also helping Amazon because usually, they are able to profile which kind of items they want to promote to our client because we have the capacity, of course, to help them in that. So, I think it's an interesting example of how we can mutually help clients, but also our positioning to our clients and the loyalty of our clients with us. People can say, "Oh, that's nice. With ING today, I have an opportunity that I don't have with any other bank, so I should stay with these guys."

Kailey Raymond: That's the name of the game, right? Driving loyalty, making sure that you're providing these exceptional experiences for customers, so that they can continue to come back to you. One of the things that you've mentioned a couple of times now is NPS and I am really curious to learn how you're actually tying that back to some of the business outcomes and some of the data that you're talking about. So, there's a lot of different ways to measure customer satisfaction, of course, NPS being one of them, but how do you make sure that you are threading the needle between the customer data that you're collecting, the NPS that you're soliciting, and the actual business outcomes? How do those three things get married together at ING?

Matteo Pomoni: Yeah, that's a very good question because we were speaking at the beginning of this podcast about customer data, right? Then you should ask yourself, what are the sources of data that are really cool to take [0:13:20.6] ____ decision? And actually, we believe in ING that there are two main sources of data, the internal source of data, which has the real time survey that we actually display to our clients after they made a transaction with us, for instance, and this is a real time survey. So we... For instance, you make a money transfer, then we ask you, "How was this experience for you? Was good or not?" And then they give you a rate. This is powerful because you know if a specific episode was good enough for your client and they give you a rating, right? And so you say, "Are we doing a good job or not?"

Matteo Pomoni: What you are missing in that picture is that you are not benchmarking yourself with the rest of the market. It's a very introspective view, but you don't know if it's good enough if the clients goes to the bank next door. That's why we believe that it is very important to enrich picture that we have on this internal survey that are, again, are real time, with something that is more not sophisticated, by the way, we say that is enriched from the benchmark with our main competitors. So, when I do a money transfer, if I benchmark with other banks that they have the same target audience that I have, how would [0:14:25.1] ____? And of course, there is a difference in terms of timing because NPS, usually, they always have a kind of a 12 months history. So, it's the perception of the clients of what happened in the last 12 months, while the survey that we do, it's right here, right now.

Matteo Pomoni: But NPS give you a trend and give you a perception of the client, which is very important. So, this gives us the opportunity to say, "Okay, so very likely, on these specific episodes, we are not good enough. We can learn from our peers, then we should make it better." And once that you do an internal survey, you should start measuring if this is happening or not, if you are improving or not. So, the two source of data together, they are very powerful to help people take the right strategic decision, and even more also to identify, what are the key moments of truth that really matters for the client because this is the other powerful element that NPS providing to you is that you cannot boil the ocean, right? You have to start from somewhere. Thanks to NPS, we are also able to understand what really bothers the client, what are the real pain points? And then on these pain points, you should put your priority to fix it and make it better for your client. And then, your final NPS picture will likely improve and you will look better, your clients will be more happier.

Kailey Raymond: So, if I'm to understand this correctly, are you running NPS or similar surveys? Do you sort of do it on every interaction? Are there certain interaction? Is it time bound? Do you do it once a year?

Matteo Pomoni: Well, the static picture of NPS doesn't tell you too much again because usually, it's a perception based on what happened in the last 12 months, right? So, what is important is to do recurrent survey on NPS and I think monthly or quarterly basis is good enough because then you start appreciating the trend. You start also appreciating and recording if the improvement actions that you put in place start being recorded and reflected also in your NPS result. And yes, what you should do is not only look at the overall relationship NPS, which is a very blurred data because it's influenced from many factors like marketing, pricing, other elements. But if you want to focus really on the customer experience, you should go to the single episode. So, identify what are the key moments of truth in your client relationship, work on that, prioritize them, and to start having a...

Kailey Raymond: I like this idea of key moments of truth. So, what's helping you surface that? Is it survey, like the actual written feedback in the NPS survey? Are you pairing customer data to infer the way that people are interacting in your apps and on your channels? How are you thinking about identifying those key moments of truth?

Matteo Pomoni: Yeah, this is a part of the NPS investigation. So, we ask our clients, what really makes a difference? So, you are able basically, to map across the different episodes. What are the moments of truth that make a client becoming an advocate of your organization or a detractor of your organization? Because we like to think that what we believe is important for our client, but sometimes things are different. Let's make an example. As a commercial guy, I would like to think that my onboarding process is a key moment of truth. But sometimes you discover that when they file a complaint, that is much more a key moment of truth than when they are onboarding your bank.

Kailey Raymond: Yes, the power of serving somebody in a moment when they are really in need versus making sure that you're onboarding somebody. There's a really big difference between somebody being perhaps agitated and somebody not being agitated. This is great. Thank you for walking me through a little bit more about NPS. I used to run it at my last company and it's a really interesting tool to be able to understand exactly who your promoters are and making sure you can also talk to them about the products that you might wanna build because they're probably your biggest fans. They might have ideas that you might not have. So, making sure you can really solicit their feedback and the detractors, if you can turn a detractor into a promoter over time by taking those key moments of truth and embedding in into your customer journey, that's obviously the end goal of a lot of what organizations do. I'm curious, NPS is probably one of these which you're building programs off the back of, you mentioned onboarding as a program that is aiding in the customer experience. Are there any other programs or campaigns that you would wanna highlight that are using some of this really rich data that we have talked about to build customer experiences?

Matteo Pomoni: Well, more than a specific campaign. I was speaking about the onboarding process, right? And of course, this is a very important element and actually, as you mentioned, as a bank, of course, we have a specific program to able to support and to make sure that this is a seamless experience for our clients. But actually, what we're trying to do is to have a more structural roles. And this is something that we are doing across the full organization, which is to identify for every single country, what are the key episode, call it before a key moment of truth, and to see, and to benchmark our experience versus our main peers and then to start working on it, having a clear person to act for every single episode.

Matteo Pomoni: And the reason for this is because we believe that finally, what the front end channel employee face when they have a complaint with a client or when they get a frustration from the client should not be something that stays only in the front end office, but should be cascaded across the full organization. Everybody should feel the pain when something goes wrong, like we should all feel proud when something goes in the right direction. Right? So, this program, to be able to identify what are the key episodes that we should work on is different with country by country, simply because on some country, we have different point of excellences, but finally, the final goal is to make sure that we have a consistent superior customer experience in all our countries.

Kailey Raymond: You're deep into your maturity in being able to deliver omnichannel, real time personal experiences. It seems like, if I'm hearing this correctly, you are creating segments and cohorts of customers in every single country, which have different moments of truth and kind of key moments that you're driving them towards unique onboarding experiences, unique programs associated with each of these people. That is something that takes a long time and a lot of infrastructure and a lot of data to build. So, kudos to y'all for being able to get there. It takes a while, it's a journey.

Matteo Pomoni: Thank you. Thank you for that. There are many people working on this, but I think a secret of this is to make sure that you are able to connect the different department organization, be focused on the same journey. Right? Or you have the analytics part, the guys that are collecting the data, you have the product owner that finally the guys that are implementing the improvement, and finally, you have the front end guys, that are the ones who feel the pain or face the music. These three layers should be very closely connected to each other, that is when you rate the maturity. And of course, again, as I was mentioning, always challenge yourself with a reliable source of internal and external, that makes it help...

Kailey Raymond: This is great. I think you've touched on a couple of these already, but I'm wondering if you have any dos and don'ts that you might share with somebody that is related to... And I'm gonna use this term and this term is specific. So, customer obsession. What are your dos and don'ts around customer obsession?

Matteo Pomoni: If I should start with the dos is map your customer journeys to identify what are the key moments of truth and the base. And the don'ts would be ignore customer feedback.

Kailey Raymond: That's good. Yes. Never ignore when a customer is actively telling you something or even if they're not actively telling you something which might look like not using your product. That's not active, but it's probably a warning sign that they're not happy. That's great. Do you have a piece of advice that you've received from a peer or a leader that you think about that is inspiring to you?

Matteo Pomoni: Yeah, it's listen to your customer because they're the final [0:22:42.3] ____ owner of the show.

Kailey Raymond: And that's how you orient those three teams together, right? You make sure that at the end of the day, the one thing that everybody has in common is the customer and making sure you're being customer-obsessed in orienting your goals.

Matteo Pomoni: Look, I think if I should give a piece of advice to someone that is doing the same job that I in another company, that wants to do the same job that I do, is when you have time, go to listen to your contact center and listen to your clients. There's no better market research than listening to your clients. And you learn a lot, and you really are able to understand what are the pains and how you can really help also your front end officer to deliver a superior customer experience, because everybody likes to talk about that. And actually as a company, we have this as one of our purposes. But then to make that happen, you really need to be close to the client. Data will help you. Your capacity in order to cascade this data in a consistent way across the organization will help you. Being able to challenge yourself with external data will help you more, but finally, if you listen to clients, really, you listen to the voice of the clients, then you learn the last piece of everything.

Kailey Raymond: My brain immediately goes to, "How do we scale that?" And I'm like, "Oh man, AI is probably the easiest way to make sure that you can use NLP to take out insights and prioritize those, and make sure you can share them out to the rest of your organization." So, I'm just super excited to kind of see where all the different AI use cases embed themselves into driving kind of next level customer experiences, customer engagement tactics, and call centers and customer feedback seems to be... It's a mountain of insight that right now, is sometimes manual to go through and so, having the machines do it for you feels like a great place to kinda spend your time.

Matteo Pomoni: Yeah. Actually, if I had to look at most disruptive trend that are happening in, not even in the financial industry, but you see, of course, a generative AI is something that is striking our attention, right? And there are multiple user cases that if you think about the financial industry, are already popping out here and there. We are watching them very closely. I can make a few examples, from the capacity to enrich your chatbot service that today, usually is a very dry experience for the finance client, while using the generative AI can become human-like experience, which is fantastic and very efficient also; to more sophisticated kind of user cases, like giving financial advice to where the client, using the capacity of generative AI, to digest incredible amount of data [0:25:20.7] ____ and tell you the best, best, best [0:25:22.2] ____ strategy... We are watching this and we see already some peers, they already adopted this kind of solution, which is very interesting, of course, but we are also very prudent for two main reasons: First, because we believe there's not still clear regulation around the use of AI and the second most important thing is because of the potential misuse of your client's data [0:25:44.4] ____ financial institutions should be very careful.

Kailey Raymond: 100%. And that's why I think it's really important right now, if anybody is thinking about AI use cases, is thinking about the quality and the security of your data at the moment; having high quality data is going to make sure that you have higher quality outcomes from any of the AI use cases that you're creating. And one of the interesting ones that you brought up is kind of AI-enabled financial advice and advisors. That's something that, of course, there's holes right now within... If you go to ChatGPT and you ask for financial advice, probably don't take it. It's taking blogs from the internet and basically spitting them back out to you. Who knows how valid that would be. But for you, you have financial advisors and you could create a library of trusted advice and leveraging NLP and then being able to serve it back with gen AI is a trusted source.

Kailey Raymond: So, I think there's a lot of these industries right now that I think have a lot of this trusted data that they are kind of sitting on, that they are the owners of, and that they can capitalize in gen AI. Because right now, I wouldn't wanna trust the financial advice of ChatGPT because it's pulling from blog posts from across the internet and who knows what the source of those are. But ING, trusted source.

Matteo Pomoni: Yeah, I believe that there's also the competitive advantage that we have. Right? That's why I was mentioning it's important that we make sure that the day that we decide to use this technology, we do it in a proper way because that is where the seat of trust of the client. If a client comes to ING is because they believe that we are acting in the best interest of our customer. If we misuse the data or we don't have a reliable source for this, all this faded away. There's more at risk than the simple customer experience that we have for NPS with a client that's more...

Kailey Raymond: Absolutely.

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Kailey Raymond: I'm wondering if you have an example of a company that you think is doing it right, that you look towards for inspiration as it relates to customer experience.

Matteo Pomoni: Well, I'm afraid here, I'm not very original because there are a few companies that across the years, in every single metric, they always appear to be outstanding when it comes to customer experience. Apple is one, for sure. The other one is Disney, and it seems very obvious because everybody knows the brands and we know that they are recognized to be champions when it comes to customer experience. But I like to mention them because to be consistent and excellent for so many years in a row means that you have an incredible disciplined internal standard to deliver to your customer promise, which I think is something that we should all strive in. So, I know this is not an original answer, but I think is still a good answer. These guys are [0:28:46.7] ____.

Kailey Raymond: It's the details with them as well. When you're opening a package from Apple, you recognize how beautiful and simple it is, and if you're even visiting a park at Disney, the scaffolding matches the ride. It's not this ugly scaffolding that's just sitting on the top of it. So, I do think that they really sit in their customers' shoes and imagine what the experience might be for somebody for the first time experiencing a brand, for the hundredth time experiencing the brand, and optimizing for that. They also have many different mediums that they interact with folks. They have media brands, they have in-person experiences. And so, to drive that consistency across all those different channels, really challenging and makes you think about some of the internal policies that they have in place to be customer-oriented, customer-obsessed.

Matteo Pomoni: They really have a customer obsession because their capacity to collect customer feedback in every single deliverables... In a Disney Park, they measure everything. And thanks to this, they are able to strive always for the next level of excellence. So, it's not something trivial. There's a lot of sophistication in their final product that is really something that I do admire.

Kailey Raymond: And little did you know, when you have the app that's telling you the wait times for the rides, like that is also collecting data for them.

Matteo Pomoni: I was exactly thinking about that. I was exactly thinking about that. I found really... They're absolute...

Kailey Raymond: Yeah, that one's a really smart one. That is improving it for you, but also delivering them back exactly what they needed. It's a win-win for everybody. We've mentioned a couple of different trends, you mentioned personalization, you mentioned velocity, you mentioned kind of these super apps, just had a brief discussion about AI, I'm wondering if you are kind of looking at or seeing any additional trends or changes on the horizon, as it relates to data and customer engagement in the next six, 12, or more months.

Matteo Pomoni: I really believe that everything that will contribute to translate a digital transactional experience through personalized emotional digital experience, is what will make a difference in the future. And this is... These trends that we've been mentioning during our podcast, they are there to stay, possible [0:31:22.1] ____ to become even more relevant. And AI, again, we are just at the beginning of the show. Right? How much this can be disruptive for any kind of industry is just to be discovered [0:31:29.7] ____.

Kailey Raymond: We'll chat at a year from now and you can let me know how all the changes have been impacting retail banking. Last question for you today, Matteo, is if you could leave us, if there's one thing that you would tell, words of wisdom, steps or recommendations for folks that are looking to uplevel their customer experience strategies.

Matteo Pomoni: Well, I would say, briefing, never stop listening, understanding your customer, prioritize anything that comes about personalization, and empower your employees because it's the best asset that you have.

Kailey Raymond: I love it. Simple. Making sure that you're putting the customer and your employee at the center of that feedback loop is absolutely critical. I really appreciate your time today. I learned a lot. Thank you so much for being here, Matteo.

Matteo Pomoni: Thank you for having me, it was a pleasure.