Banks Need More Customer Experience Skills

Experience-Based Differentiation (EBD) represents a blueprint for customer experience excellence that builds on three key principles: 1) obsess about customer needs, not product features; 2) reinforce brand with every interaction, not just communications; and 3) treat customer experience as a competence, not a function. To help gauge banks' progress toward EBD, we asked 190 North American banking executives to answer 12 questions that comprise our EBD self-test. We discovered that large banks do a better job of obsessing about customer needs, employees lack a strong understanding of their bank's brand, and small banks are less likely than large banks to monitor customer interactions. To get the most out of this diagnostic tool, banks should take the test, share the results, discuss the implications, and make plans to improve their scores over time.