The Digital Experience: Looking back at a year of accelerated growth and the trends and transformations to come
“We deliberately focus on the word “experience” and not the word “conversion” — the words we use matter, and it keeps us all focused on transforming experiences, not just converting to platforms.”
Kelli Griffin, SVP, Head of Experience, Northwest Bank
Kelli Griffin, SVP, Head of Experience at Northwest Bank, is passionate about keeping customers and employees engaged. The key for her is a focus on experience (instead of conversion) and a culture of coaching that starts at the top of the organization. Horizn spoke with Griffin about the successful launch of Northwest’s new digital platforms and what most excites her in the year ahead.
How has Northwest been thinking about digital transformation over the last 12 months?
Like many organizations, the pandemic put us on a fast track to accelerate our digital transformation. For Northwest, digital transformation isn’t just about converting from one platform to another or launching a new banking capability, it’s about creating new ways of doing business that evolve both our employee and customer experience.
“We deliberately focus on the word “experience” and not the word “conversion” — the words we use matter, and it keeps us all focused on transforming experiences, not just converting to platforms.”
Over the past 12 months, Northwest has launched a new deposit origination experience, a new online and mobile banking experience, a new website experience and numerous new capabilities within each of those. We deliberately focus on the word “experience” and not the word “conversion” — the words we use matter, and it keeps us all focused on transforming experiences, not just converting to platforms.
How has your employee digital education evolved?
Northwest has a culture that rallies around the desire to be coaches. We coupled our coaching culture with a movement that we called Go Digital and created a bank-wide movement that even included our BOD. The idea is to create awareness, educate about a digital capability, have our employees engage in the capability through a Horizn digital demo and then adopt it themselves and share it with customers.
“We first drove awareness to employees and then as a fast follow to our customers — much of this enabled by fully leveraging Horizn’s full suite of platforms.”
With the launch of your new platforms this year, how did you support and drive awareness throughout the organization?
We first drove awareness to employees and then as a fast follow to our customers — much of this enabled by fully leveraging Horizn’s full suite of platforms.
We identified different tasks that we knew would need a little more hand holding, along with the tasks that we knew would drive call volume to our call centre. We were able to support these areas with the development of digital demos to reduce call volume and provide a little bit more self-sufficiency in the process.
“We quickly realized that the [Horizn] platform had the capability to do much more and meet a broader need than we had.”
How are you using the employee platform as a communication tool to talk with frontline employees about all things digital?
When we first started our engagement with Horizn, our intention was to use the employee learning platform to deliver demos and leverage the social aspect to create excitement and engagement. However, we quickly realized that the platform had the capability to do much more and meet a broader need than we had.
We took a unique approach and have used the platform as our true one-stop-shop for all digital- (and transformation-) related awareness and education and our vehicle for many communications.
What are you most excited about for the year ahead?
I’m excited about taking the foundation that we’ve built and using our digital transformation as the catalyst to do so much more: reimagining our traditional banking experiences and how we deliver them to our customers, creating new business models, and driving adoption and engagement. We know we aren’t just competing with other banks anymore — the Apples and Amazons of the world continue to raise the bar for us. So we’re competing with everybody that’s out there.
And the last thing I would say I’m excited about is taking that critical step to make sure we have digital experiences that are important to up-and-coming generations of customers that we haven’t acquired or who haven’t even started to bank yet, especially as we continue to grow as an organization. We have a great runway built to educate and introduce customers to our digital solutions through all channels — supported in many ways by Horizn.
This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity. Watch the video above to see the full version.
