A New Standard in Service

for Standard Chartered Bank

With the banking environment changing in Hong Kong

and its other key markets, Standard Chartered Bank

turned to a relationship-focused approach

to improve both the customer and staff experience

and to gain a critical competitive edge.

 This has been an all-too-familiar scene in financial institutions
worldwide:
A customer spends 20 minutes providing personal data required to
apply for a loan, then a few weeks or months later wastes a similar
amount of time providing the same personal data required for
another service provided by the same branch sales representative.
Customers with questions or requests are transferred from point
to point—or are shifted from email to call center service
representatives—and are asked to repeat the same story over
and over.
The list of service snubs and sales snafus is long for many financial
institutions. Enjoying the benefits of markets and interest rates that
were artificially protected by regulatory policies, banks have been
able to succeed without paying much attention to service.
But around the globe, that has been changing. As regulatory
protections have been removed and market forces have come into
play, margins have declined dramatically. Competition has increased
as financial institutions have entered market segments and territories
where they had not been allowed previously. Successful banks have
had to find new ways to maintain their existing base, attract
prospects, and improve their “wallet share.” One of the more
rewarding strategies has been to build closer relationships with
customers, enabling banks to anticipate needs and provide a higher
level of personalized service.
A compelling illustration of this approach is offered by Standard
Chartered Bank. The 150-year-old bank—with more than $120
billion in assets and 30,000 employees in 50 countries—is one of the
largest to target emerging markets in Asia Pacific, South Asia, the
Middle East, the United Kingdom, and the Americas.
A Rapidly Changing Environment
In Hong Kong, where Standard Chartered Bank generates
approximately one-third of its revenues, the banking environment
has changed rapidly in recent years. This has forced financial
institutions to become more nimble and creative with customer
offerings—or to pay a high price for failing to do so.
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Beginning in the mid-1990s, the Hong Kong Monetary Authority
(HKMA) deregulated interest rates on short-term time and savings
accounts, as well as demand deposit (checking) accounts. Interest
rates became highly competitive, but parity products made it much
more difficult to attract or retain customers based on rates alone. At
roughly the same time, virtually all of Asia was impacted by the
“Asian Economic Crisis,” a major economic downturn that sent
property values plummeting by up to 60 percent. Sales volumes
slowed to a trickle, creating fierce competition among banks for a
smaller number of loans. This squeezed margins razor thin, as
financial institutions fought to retain their customers.
There was also a considerable amount of industry consolidation, as
financial institutions merged or acquired other banks that were a
good fit. Even Standard Chartered got into the act, acquiring the
assets of Chase Manhattan Bank’s Hong Kong-based retail banking
business. The many mergers and acquisitions worldwide further
fueled competition from larger institutions with deeper resources.
In Standard Chartered’s case, it also forced the bank to deal with
the staff issues that often arise as two corporate cultures are
blended together.
What’s more, the economic decline that affected property values in
Asia shook the confidence of investors. Many of these people sought
to diversify their holdings into a wider variety of wealth products,
including bank-offered accounts and investment vehicles. To take

advantage of this demand, bank sales staff had to be transformed
from strictly order takers into financial planners or investment
consultants. Again, Standard Chartered had the added challenge of
integrating many disparate products and channels following its
acquisition of Chase’s retail business in Hong Kong.
The final major development over the past few years—and one that
was unique to Hong Kong—was that in the period immediately
prior to Hong Kong’s return to Chinese sovereignty, several hundred
thousand wealthy customers left the city for a time to live in
Australia or Canada, before deciding to return once things were
stable. “These individuals grew accustomed to some of the services
routinely provided to affluent customers in other countries, and
their expectations were considerably elevated when they returned to
Hong Kong,” explains Steven Parker, Head of Customer Sales and
Service for Consumer Banking at Standard Chartered Bank.
For all of these reasons, banks throughout Hong Kong began to
emphasize higher service quality in their dealings with customers.
Standard Chartered Bank knew that to stay ahead of some of its
more agile competitors and retain its best customers, it needed to
reinvent itself in the area of service.
“In the past, it was fine to have relatively standard products and sell
them in standard ways—and the ample margins would ensure a
profit,” remarks Parker. “We decided that, strategically, the ground
that we needed to play on was brand assurance, customer focus, and
quality service.”
The bank recently moved swiftly and decisively to develop and
implement a sweeping change program called Customer One.
Designed to achieve market differentiation and enhance employee
satisfaction as well, the ambitious business transformation strategy
sought to strengthen the bank’s brand identity and help the bank
become more customer-focused and performance-oriented.
“We wanted to make sure that whatever we did with Customer One
supported what was happening with the bank’s brand overall,”
Parker notes. “About a year into our effort, the bank launched a new
branding slogan. We refined our program initiatives to incorporate
and support our brand values and to stay properly aligned with how
the bank was seen by our customers.”
Fragmented View
One of the obstacles to delivering an extraordinary level of customer
service was not having the consolidated customer information that
the bank needed to respond to individual requirements. Although
Standard Chartered Bank had invested substantial amounts of
money into building a data warehouse, the bank did not have a
single platform for sharing this customer information, particularly
for front-line staff. Instead, data resided in information “silos” within
product- and channel-specific databases, resulting in a fragmented
view of customers. Because of this, Standard Chartered had difficulty
providing a consistent and fulfilling brand experience to customers.
Replies to customer queries and service requests were often delayed,
especially if the requests required bank officers to search for
information across databases created and maintained by various
bank departments or business units. More importantly, without a
360-degree view of customer information, Standard Chartered’s
banking officers were unable to capitalize on day-to-day
opportunities to cross-sell and up-sell additional products and
services based on unique needs or desires.
“With rising customer expectations, we needed to have the means to
understand our customers better,” Parker notes. “We had to find a
way to provide more timely responses, to tailor advice to meet
individual requirements, and to help guide customers in considering
various products that would suit their particular requirements.”
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 Programmed for Change managers also have instant access to automated sales performance
At the core of the bank’s Customer One change program was a reporting, giving them visibility over how their staff is performing
sophisticated customer relationship management (CRM) solution and what sales are in the pipeline. This information can be used to
developed by California-based Siebel Systems. “Siebel Finance better allocate human resources and
encapsulated best-practice CRM from a banking perspective,” says to improve sales and service.
“Siebel Finance
Parker. “It gave us the firepower we needed to reach our goal of
The bank also expected Customer encapsulated best-
becoming the preferred partner of our customers.”
One to help improve the daily work practice CRM from a
Launched in 2002, Customer One involved no less than a complete experience for its employees. The banking perspective,”
reengineering of the bank’s sales and service processes within its tremendous amount of manual says Parker. “It gave
consumer banking segment. As Parker and his team saw it, the bank processing required to open accounts us the firepower we
was starting from a position of a “transaction handler,” with staff and meet service requests had needed to reach our
members being largely reactive, product-focused order takers—with resulted in growing employee goal of becoming the
a very short-term view. The goal of Customer One was to shift dissatisfaction, underscored by an preferred partner of
the mindset, then shift the philosophy—enhance the customer attrition rate that peaked at 30 to 40 our customers.”
experience by becoming a proactive, customer-focused relationship percent annually.
seller, ultimately transforming the bank into the right partner for
its customers. “Our staff was not happy with the amount of manual work and
hours that daily business entailed and honestly felt that this
Standard Chartered Bank’s Customer-Focused Approach
prevented them from doing their best in serving customers,” explains
Parker. “Whenever there were any big sales campaigns, the staff
had to work long hours manually processing the accounts. People
could end up working until ten or eleven at night inputting
specific information.”

The implementation of this ambitious change program involved

-

several elements:

Deploying CRM
Siebel Finance was initially rolled out to more than 900 front-line
and back-office staff across 90 retail branches and two large call
center facilities in Hong Kong and Singapore. CRM provides
Standard Chartered’s people with a 360-degree view of customers
Staff members are expected to be responsive to the intentions of
across the primary consumer product lines and channels such
each customer—understanding and anticipating needs. Bank
as branches or automated teller machines. This enables
representatives don’t simply sell products and services, but rather are
employees to view a customer’s history, products and services
in the business of providing financial solutions that facilitate a long-
used, and preferences.
term view of customer requirements.

The powerful application also provides a solid platform for

For example, using a CRM feature called micro marketing, the
analyzing data to use in customer management, lead and
professional staff or branch personnel could conduct a search to
opportunity management, targeted mail and phone campaigns
determine which customers might have investments in Japanese unit
promoting specific products and services to precisely selected
trusts. These individuals might then be contacted if the bank offered
groups of customers, sales tracking, and reporting.
a Japanese guaranteed fund or similar insured product. Branch

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Establishing New Business Processes
Standard Chartered Bank recognized that using its CRM system
properly would require additional work for its already overloaded
staff. The bank addressed this by simplifying and automating a wide
variety of tasks to free up time for the staff to attract and serve
customers better.
One of the innovations was adapting “straight-through” processing
that the bank already used for opening accounts to other tasks such
as issuing ATM cards or even handling loan applications. Previously,
if a customer requested a replacement ATM card, for instance, a
form had to be completed and processed manually. In addition, the
customer contact person often had to follow up with back-office
processing staff to be sure that the card was sent.
“Now, using CRM automation, once the service request is keyed into
the computer, the order goes straight through to our legacy systems,
and the card is automatically mailed to the customer,” Parker says.
Straight-through processing offers even bigger benefits in
streamlining loan applications and credit scoring. “The way that it
used to work was a customer would fill out a paper form,” Parker
explains. “The loan processor would do some credit scoring on the
spot, but more manual processing was required after the bank closed
its doors for the day.”
The most time-consuming, energy-draining phase of the process
came once the scoring was completed. “If a customer was rejected
when applying for, say, a $50,000 personal loan,” continues Parker,
“the procedure typically involved adjusting one or more
parameters—loan amounts or terms—to see at what level the
customer could qualify.” It was always a puzzle—$40,000, $30,000,
$25,000, or a longer repayment period; what would be needed to get
the customer to qualify?
Introducing Customer One to the Staff
With its complexity, the multilayer change program was not
something that would be easy to integrate into the bank’s workflow,
nor to get employees to adopt. Here again, Standard Chartered Bank
recognized the challenges—and opportunities—and moved to
introduce Customer One with exceptionally intelligent and
imaginative training and support.
The first phase was called “Customer Voice,” where Standard
Chartered helped its staff see what customers really thought about
the bank. “We showed our employees videos—presented from our
customers’ perspective—of how we were providing service at that
time,” Parker remembers. “Once we’d done that, we presented a
series of workshops that we called ‘Creating the Future.’ Here, we
demonstrated prototypes of how we would use Siebel’s CRM
solution to improve product delivery and service quality.”
The bank gave employees plenty of opportunity to gain hands-on
experience with the prototypes, so that people could learn how to be
a solutions provider rather than an order taker and appreciate the
productivity gains and work quality improvements made possible by
Customer One and the supporting CRM platform.
One of the most impressive training tools that Standard Chartered
created was “A Day in the Life of CRM.” Used in the training
workshops and focus groups, “A Day in the Life” provided an outline
of what a typical day would be like once the CRM solution was in

“With straight-through processing, the loan officer simply types the

data onto the screen and inputs the customer’s criteria, and the
system does the rest—scoring the loan and calculating counter-offers
as needed,” remarks Parker. “With existing customers, many of the
screens are prefilled with name, address, and so on. This has reduced
the personal loan application process from 30 to 40 minutes down to
about 5 minutes.”

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 place. Employees learned how easy it would be to maintain customer
contact diaries, review calendars and the latest internal and external
news developments, generate progress reports on sales in the
pipeline, and maintain organized lists of leads and opportunities.
“The scenarios that we created gave employees a realistic view of
how they could use the CRM system in their various activities—
whether glancing through their diary first thing in the morning,
talking face-to-face with customers, or searching customer portfolios
to identify future opportunities after the close of business,” says
Parker. “It was clear that effectiveness would be greatly enhanced and
personal satisfaction would rise.”
Once the change program was implemented, in-branch coaching was
supplied to all employees using the system, and refresher classroom
training and Web-based instruction was available for those who
needed it.
Banking on Measurable Results
The transformation of the consumer banking sales and service
environment at Standard Chartered Bank branches in Hong Kong
and Singapore has been remarkably successful. From the beginning,
the bank made it a priority to establish a number of quantifiable
measures of the program’s impact within the bank.
“Our key goals included improving the customer experience,
improving the staff experience, and making channel distribution
more effective,” Parker comments. “We’ve seen very good increases in
all three areas.”
ROI Achieved
+ 56% + 60%
+ 39%
+ 18% + 6.5%
Improved sales
conversion rates Improved retention rate
of affluent segment
Increased cross-sell Increased staff - 52%
rate of affluent segment satisfaction
Reduced staff turnover
For example, staff satisfaction, which once languished at 56 percent,
increased to 78 percent within two years, a solid gain of 39 percent.
Standard Chartered’s staff saw considerable improvement in the
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efficiency of processes (some tasks were streamlined by as much as
60 percent), their use of technology, and the ability to be more
professional in doing their jobs. The rise in staff satisfaction helped
drive down costly and disruptive turnover by more than 50 percent.
All of the bank’s branch managers thought that the change program
was a success.
On the customer side, the bank has seen dramatic improvements.
Sales conversion rates have soared by 56 percent. In addition, the
cross-sell rate among the highly desirable, affluent customer
segment—which is critical for increasing customer retention within
this key group—climbed by 18 percent. Not surprisingly, Standard
Chartered Bank has seen its retention rate among its best customers
increase by 6.5 percent.
“To this point, our return on
investment is already two to three
“To this point, our
times the amount we spent on the
return on investment
entire change program,” declares
is already two to
Parker. “From the start, we never
focused on reducing staff or
three times the
cutting costs. Our objective was to amount we spent
improve customer interactions and on the entire
increase revenue, and we have change program.”
managed to do a great deal in
that regard.”
Throughout the change program, the CRM solution provided by
Siebel has played a key role for Standard Chartered Bank, deployed
in both the bank’s branches and call centers. “The staff has a great
tool in Siebel,” Parker says. “In the call center, we’ve been able to
make things much more efficient and provide a more streamlined
customer experience. In the branches, the environment is completely
different today. The staff has a single view of the customer and can
be more proactive. Leads or service requests can be processed
seamlessly across all channels.”
Improved process
efficiencies
The bank is clearly sold on what CRM can accomplish in elevating
service levels above those of its competitors. “We’ve come an
enormous way, and we are delighted that we’ve been able to
transform the way that our staff serves customers,” notes Parker. “We
can be much more professional—build real relationships and assist
our customers in ways that we didn’t even dream about in the past.”

Continuous Improvement
Although the formal change management program has now run its
course at Standard Chartered, the bank has grown it into an ongoing
operational process, with the goal of “out-serving” the competition.
To support continuous improvement, the bank has established a
Customer Experience organization, which consolidates all of the
process and design teams focused on improving customer sales and
service that implemented the Customer One program. In addition,
Standard Chartered has established its own customer council, which
is tasked with helping front-line staff continue to streamline
processes, improve customer management, and further develop the
extensive capabilities offered by the CRM platform.
Among the near-term focuses for enhancements are:
• Installation of more “triggers”—Adding pre-approval and
pre-attrition indicators that alert the staff to opportunities or
potential problems raised by significant declines in customer
satisfaction
• Better-aligned incentives—Offering staff members larger bonuses
and other rewards that motivate them to push their service
performance higher, maintain their training, and improve their
interactions with customers
• Improved technical performance—Fine-tuning of the
application to speed response times and make the solution even
more usable by bank staff
Parker has some advice for other financial institutions that might
wish to undertake a comprehensive change program like Standard
Chartered Bank’s.
“Start with a strong business strategy and benefits focus,” Parker
says. “We designed our program around clear business issues and
rigorously benchmarked and tracked benefits. In addition, banks
must really listen to their staff. We conducted surveys before and
after launching Customer One in the branches. This allowed us to
literally adjust the change management program day by day,
depending on the feedback. Being very conscious of what the staff
thought was key.”
At Standard Chartered Bank, the Customer One change program is
viewed as an essential part of a journey to make the bank more
customer-oriented and relationship-focused—resulting in a higher
standard of service and a winning strategy in a challenging
marketplace. To Parker and other top managers at the bank, that
journey has just begun.
Steven Parker
Head, Customer Sales & Service, Consumer Banking
Standard Chartered Bank
Steven led the major change program
to improve the customer experience for
Standard Chartered Bank’s retail
customers, through transformation of its
customer management processes and
enhancement of its distribution channels.
Steven’s previous responsibilities within
Standard Chartered included e-commerce
and marketing for wealth management,
as well as creation of the bank’s business intelligence capabilities.
Steven has worked across Europe and Asia Pacific in marketing, sales,
strategy, and business development roles, with Intercontinental Hotels,
Booz-Allen & Hamilton, and HSBC.
Steven has a degree from Oxford University and an MBA from INSEAD.
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