First up, can you please give a very warm welcome to Simon James and Magnus Fitchett from Publicis Sapient. They're yours.
Good morning, everyone. I'm Magnus and this is Si. And as I said, we're going to talk a little bit about customer experience, which we're going to refer to as CX for abbreviation as we go through, and the imperative to stand out, not fit in, if you want to actually grow your business. So we've got some slides and some obligatory stats to sort of frame the conversation. I think it follows on from some of the previous speakers. So the first stat is 89% of companies are primarily competing on CX. So this is a massive importance for the growth of business. Not surprisingly, three in four are saying it's their top objective. You are saying it is your top objective in terms of as an area of investment. And the investment that's going into it is one in every four pounds is roughly spent on CX. And in fact, for some of you in this room, for about 50%, it's almost two out of every four pounds. So this is a big area, important focus. Bit of an inconvenient truth is a lot of what has been talked about this morning in terms of digital transformation programs are resulting in failure, a failure to meet the objectives in which you actually set out to achieve. Depending upon the study you look at, it's anywhere between 70% and about 80, I think 3%, 84% of companies are failing to meet that CX objectives. There is some good news. All that investment in digital transformation is resulting in actually companies getting better, adapting to change, adapting to new kind of customer needs. And our own analysis of Publicis Sapient says that actually today, companies globally in the financial services space is taking between four to six months to go from an idea that you've got, maybe a proposition or a feature to live in the market. That's a rough global kind of view. That's halved from it's got much quicker over the last five years. There's been a massive impact. So there's really good momentum there. However, that ability to with the speed is as soon as somebody is launching a new feature, a new proposition, the ability to copy. And what we're seeing is what I would describe as a sea of sameness. And if you look at things like mobile apps that one of the previous speakers was talking about, everyone's in the same ballpark when you're looking at scores on something like Apple Store or something like that, 4.5 to 4.9 kind of score. Everyone's roughly the same. So how do you work out how much to invest in CX and where do you invest and how do you drive standout? Well, given that the C in CX is about customer, we thought the best place to begin is looking at customers themselves kind of in their own words, where we scraped over 100,000 customer reviews from publicly available sources. And we sorted those reviews for only five star reviews. So only where people are very happy about the service they're getting from the bank. And then we use some natural language processing to analyze the patterns that exist for different brands, particularly when you compare them against each other. And that's what we've generated some observations here. This is an obligatory complicated chart to prove they've actually done the work and not just kind of summarize this at a very high level. But basically, the blue area is terms that predominantly appear in styling five star reviews that don't appear in Monzo reviews. And conversely, the red area is terms that appear in Monzo five star reviews that don't appear in styling reviews to try to work out the spaces that these kind of companies occupy dealing in this sameness, this commoditized view around the mobile app. And thankfully, I've summarized this so you don't have to read every single thing on here. But basically, when you look at two challenger banks in the UK, they're ultimately competing over features. This is a battleground over features. The things that people talk about relating to Monzo is the early payday, bill splitting, being able to upload your contacts so you can pay people directly. On styling side, it's a zero, but, you know, accounting integration, being able to deposit cash at a post office and having different accounts in different currencies. And in the middle, they have kind of different terms for the same thing, which really splitting up your money into spaces or pots. So, you know, very much a black and white competition over features. But if you compare Monzo with a random and we took this at random high street bank, what do you see is for the high street bank, the language is extremely different, very different. So while for Monzo, you still get the kind of the features that are the things that stand out for Barclays. Barclays reviews five star reviews are 28 times more likely to feature the word kind in some way or polite or patient or positive comments about being spoken to and ultimately five times more helpful. And the initial brief for this talk was like, what are the seven rules for CX? And the reality is there aren't seven golden rules. If there was, everyone would be doing the same thing. It's actually what's true to you and your brand is more important to understand. Bring that out. That's how you stand out is by being true to the strengths you have as a business, not just copycatting the experience.
But Magnus, in that presentation, it used the word copycatting, basically, that banks are copying from one another and it's resulting from a certain degree of commoditization of experience. But I guess that if you just copy, it makes you a bit complacent because you're just looking within a certain group. So where else should banks be looking for that inspiration if they're to actually stand above the crowd and offer something that is different that people like me will want to go to?
Yeah, good question. So, yeah, I think if you find yourself, you know, no one's a leader if you're copying. So if you find yourself copying all of the features of other of your competitors, you're really not a leader in the space. So, you know, where do you take your inspiration from? Well, you're going to have to take it from from customers. So you have to be customer led, which we talked about before. But I think something that Tanya just touched on, which is like purpose. You're going to have to go in and look at and Simon kind of covered it in one of the charts, but the DNA of your business and the purpose of your organization and look at, you know, how do you show up differently as a bank? And it's there where you can find a rich seam of opportunity to create kind of memorable experiences that cannot be copied as quickly or others do not have the right to copy in the same fashion. So customer and and absolutely your brand and what you stand for.
Yeah, I mean, we've had two keynote addresses from HSBC and Handelsbank and and within that, we've heard about what it is they're doing to make sure that that customer experience, the CX stands out. Tell me about it from that West perspective. Yeah, what is it that you're doing? How are you reimagining that customer journey?
And it is interesting because to Magnus's speech earlier on with Cy, it is all about how do you bring to life the experience? And I would say a couple of things. Firstly, it's really important behind that strategy and the priorities and the purpose that you've got a strong investment bed as well so that actually digital and technology is really well invested in that West. We've got over 80 percent of our three billion budget over three years being invested in digital and technology. That really allows us to leverage the data and the way in which we operate to make sure that we're servicing what our customers needs are. So we're starting to anticipate their needs and working with them to understand how they're evolving. That's really, really important. That enables us also to make sure we're investing well in the way in which we operate. So my my role is to make sure we're delivering value through our customer journeys. Also colleague. No pressure. No pressure. Also, also colleague journeys because it is about our people that will drive the transformations I've touched on. So making sure we invest well in our colleagues as well as our customers. Really, really important to us. And one additional way which I'd leave on probably is in terms of doing things differently is building that closer and deeper relationships with customers. And an example I would give is is really in our youth market where we thought really carefully about how do we connect withYouth of today and tomorrow. This is not about all our customers today, these are about actually how do we support our communities and our broader families around us. And we've done a couple of things in the last year which you may have heard about in terms of announcements, but firstly we've partnered with Marcus Rashford to look at the initiatives that we can do with our school-age children, thinking about from a money-wise and also career sense perspective, how we can support them to think about their finances in a healthy way, to have healthy relationships with their money. We've also partnered with Rooster to look at an app for our parents and our children on actually how they can be supported to help look after their pocket money and their money and actually gain that sense of independence and help around the value of money and actually what does that mean and look like. And then at the same time we're also expanding internally, how do we actually connect with the youth of today? And that's not us, unfortunately. So we're using our social media networks, we've got a great team now on TikTok doing some influencing work for us, giving some great market research across the youth that actually are going to be able to support us thinking about what are the solutions for tomorrow. So all those things really start to build out where we've actually got at the moment around about 86% of our retail digital offerings for our retail customers. So some things more to do, but definitely some good progress made.
Okay, we're all youths in here. Remember, you're only as old as you feel. We all feel 16, so we are youths in this room, okay. But look, Tanya, we're going to have to leave it there. And also Magnus, thank you so much for that. There's a lot more that I could discuss with both of you, but sadly time goes against us. There's plenty of ground to cover. But before we close out completely, just let you know that Simon and Magnus, they do have a lot to say. Trust me on this. They're going to be around in the barista lounge afterwards if you have any questions. So please go in, say hello, and you can tell them some more about the report as well. But look, Magnus and Tanya, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you. Thank you.