Digital First: How a change in mindset is helping Nationwide meet its members where they are today — and where they will be in the future
“We call it ‘digital with a human touch’ — giving members choice by giving them the knowledge to transact digitally should they want to.”
Liz Jones, Product Owner, Digital Education, Nationwide Building Society.
Liz Jones, Product Owner, Digital Education, Nationwide Building Society, understands that different segments have different needs. As the leader of a team tasked with innovation and education, she has helped Nationwide invest in a digital-first approach, training staff to serve Nationwide’s members across all channels. Horizn spoke with Jones about understanding your audience and going digital without losing the human touch.
How do financial institutions overachieve digital banking growth objectives?
The pandemic taught us so much more about member behaviour. We had to really understand how to help our members transition and change their behaviour and attitude to digital banking.
Listening to our members’ needs and responding with the right solutions to support them has been key to what we’ve done. What we recognized was that there’s no real one-size-fits-all. When you talk about segmentation, there’s often a specific problem that some people are looking to solve.
“We embed Digital Demos about new or lesser-used features into our emails, allowing quick and easy access and making their lives easier.”
We started inviting members to attend digital know-how events. They allow members to meet with colleagues from the comfort of their own home, where Digital Demos can be shared to increase confidence and awareness of digital banking.
We also learned that some of our younger members were resistant to change. These segments want ease and simplicity as they don’t always have the time to explore alternative methods for doing transactions. So we embed Digital Demos about new or lesser-used features into our emails, allowing quick and easy access and making their lives easier.
How is Nationwide addressing the need to up-skill branch and contact centre team members with strong digital skills?
This is all about investment in our people. At Nationwide, we are committed to keeping our branches on the high street. In order for that to be successful, we need to ensure our members are equipped with the tools to choose how they want to bank.
We have heavily invested in our colleagues over the last 12 months. With the way we operate and use our physical premises having changed so much, we needed to ensure our people were ready and have up-skilled them so that they are truly multi-skilled.
“We call it ‘digital with a human touch’ — giving members choice by giving them the knowledge to transact digitally should they want to.”
It’s about giving them the right tools in their kit bag to have those initial conversations around digital and the opportunity that digital brings. Being able to provide a Digital Demo gives the safety and the space for colleagues and members to play and familiarize themselves before actually going in and doing it for themselves. It has added huge value.
We call it ‘digital with a human touch’ — giving members choice by giving them the knowledge to transact digitally should they want to.
How do financial institutions make call centres efficient and profitable through digital?
We’ve been focused on reviewing member behaviour and understanding how they use our channels. This has led to a reduction in branch opening hours and repurposing the use of the branch, and colleague time has been freed up to respond to members on the phone or online. So we now have more people than ever available to respond to member needs. This creates time and space to invest in our members by educating them on the various ways of banking and providing them with the knowledge so they can make an informed choice.
“We plan to embed Digital Demos into all appropriate member journeys on our website to provide education on how to self-serve at the time it’s needed most.”
We’ve also been making Digital Demos more accessible to members by embedding the links in many of our member emails, as well as placing them in the most appropriate part of our website. We plan to embed Digital Demos into all appropriate member journeys on our website to provide education on how to self-serve at the time it’s needed most.
How are financial institutions redefining the digital customer?
This is very topical for us at the moment. We know that members who are digitally engaged tend to log in, on average, 26 times per month. To promote our digital channels and tools, we have a number of digital education initiatives that are run frequently.
But most importantly, we’ve all adopted a digital-first mindset. This encourages the right conversation every time. We certainly don’t make digital the only way to do things, and welcome members using all of our channels, but it does promote ways we can help make our members’ lives easier.
