building customer centricity using nps

Customer-centricity

Delivering distinct experiences

Our approach

At HDFC Bank, customers are at the centre of everything we do. Our relationship with our customers goes much beyond transactions and encompasses their entire journey from awareness to loyalty.

We also believe that delivering an outstanding customer experience is a strong differentiator for a great product and is key to a sustained competitive advantage. With this in view, we on-boarded one of the top management consulting firms to help us develop and implement a Customer Experience (CX) programme called ‘Infinite Smiles’.

As the first step, we benchmarked our CX performance through comprehensive primary research covering 30+ cities in India and a sample of 15,000+ in-person interviews.

Benefits of CX Transformation Programme

Puts the voice of the customer at the heart of everything we do
Empowers employees to continuously improve customer experience
Employees earn their customers’ advocacy
Enables culture change

Building Customer-centric Culture Using Net Promoter System (NPS) - 'Infinite Smiles'

In order to institutionalise the measurement into a management system, we implemented a high velocity, closed-loop customer feedback system branded as “Infinite Smiles”. This system will help us in establishing employee behaviours and practices that leads to customer-centric actions – leading to continuous improvements, in our offerings, processes, and policies.

A comprehensive bottom-up measurement of customer loyalty is a cornerstone of the Infinite Smiles Program. The measurement encompasses key channels – Branch Banking, Virtual Channels and Contact Centres, critical episodes – In branch transactions, Service Interactions, Query/Request and Leads. We contacted around 43.5 million customers in FY21.

Guided by our aspiration to move from score to systems, we have been working to institutionalize the process for addressing customer issues that transcend beyond measurement and create a culture of customer-centricity and agility.

At HDFC Bank we believe that customer experience is the total journey of a customer’s interactions with a brand and is integrated with the customer’s entire lifecycle. Hence, we aim to improve customer’s advocacy (emotional, psychological, and physical connection) with the brand. Our ‘Infinite Smiles’ programme rests on three meticulously designed pillars – ‘Listen’; ‘Learn’; and ‘Act’ which enables us to embed customer-feedback led transformation as a discipline into our systems, challenge what is considered as the standard, and offer a customer experience that places us amongst the greatest service brands.

In order to institutionalize the system, a rigorous and well-defined process for addressing customer issues was established which transcends measurement:

Beyond strategic review item for the management: The aspiration to build a customer-obsessed culture trickles down from the top management to our central and cross-functional teams. ‘Listen’, ‘Learn’ and ‘Act’ is now a mantra used by everyone, every day to prioritise opportunities for improvement
Beyond benchmarking: We are diligently acting on practices to reinforce the employees’ commitment towards creating promoters. To achieve this, we are pursuing a culture of employee engagement through cascade workshops, coaching, trainings, recognition, and celebrating individual successes.
Championing the change: We are continuously working to inspire the front-line with adequate training and coaching. Our ‘Smile Champions’ persistently work as NPS ambassadors at the frontline and central teams to foster demand for NPS in other parts of the business.
Bias towards action: We are committed to translating the feedback into to CX initiatives. We are developing holistic ecosystems complemented with the requisite tools and framework that empower our employees to deconstruct customer feedback and inform systemic improvements and strategic customer initiatives.

We have conducted over 84,000 huddles until March 2021 which has helped weave in a culture to review customer feedback, discuss actions and subsequently plan and execute improvements.

We embarked on our journey to build a customer obsessed culture. It has been our constant effort to include everyone in the organisation and work together to achieve our CX ambition.

Infinite Smiles programme reflects our determination to challenge what is considered standard; to move beyond and be the very best we can be. Living up to this aspiration will enable HDFC Bank to reach levels of service and customer experience that place us amongst the greatest service brands.

Building Customer Centricity using NPS