Building a Digital Activation Strategy that led to RBC Winning the Celent Model Bank of the Year Award
“It’s not just knowing that we have digital capabilities, but it’s also being confident about talking about those digital capabilities, and the importance and the value of digital to our clients.“
Emma Ballantyne, Senior Director of Digital Sales at RBC, Royal bank of Canada.
As expectations of frontline staff skyrocketed in the wake of the pandemic, RBC made sure its frontline employees were fluent and equipped to talk digital with their customers. Horizn spoke with Emma Ballantyne, Senior Director of Digital Sales for Royal Bank of Canada, about how COVID changed digital banking, how RBC has kept pace with innovation, and what winning the 2020 Celent Model Bank of the Year award meant to the organization.
How has COVID changed how RBC thinks about digital banking?
It’s put a big magnifying glass over digital and created an accelerant for what we need to build with our digital capabilities for both our frontline staff and our advisors.
“Banking has really shifted towards everybody needing a level of digital fluency and expertise.”
Our number one priority when COVID first hit was how do we keep our frontline staff and our clients safe? And you can see this through some of the capability that we released, like remote account open, where we used AI technology for identification and verification, where a client can scan one of their IDs, like a passport or a driver’s license, and then take a selfie so that we can have our KYC regulations (our Know Your Client regulations) met.
The digital expectation of frontline employees has skyrocketed. What has RBC been doing to ensure that your employees’ digital fluency can keep up with expectations?
You’ve been with us on this journey since 2015. When we started, it was okay to have one digital expert within each of the branches, or the advice center. And that’s really shifted towards everybody needing a level of digital fluency and expertise. It’s not just knowing that we have digital capabilities, it’s also being confident talking about those digital capabilities, and the importance and the value of digital to our clients. With the DigitalLearn platform, [we’ve used] gamification to teach them what those capabilities are, providing quizzes and interactive tutorials where they can understand the value of these capabilities. The flip side of that is the ability to share those tutorials and demos so they can take that learning and knowledge and apply it to supporting clients.
“We know that having both the digital and the human touch points with our clients creates a much deeper relationship.”
It’s always been important to us to enable and empower our frontline staff, to talk about our products in digital, in particular. That has increased with the expectation that everybody is going to be confident talking about it. The Digital Navigator Program has also powered and enabled that. It’s supported at a national office level, but it’s really empowered at a grassroots level, and a community level of peer mentorship and support.
What has the 2020 Celent Model Bank of the Year award meant to the organization?
The award has two parts: One is enabling the digital product teams to provide best-in-class digital products. And the other is that we have all these great capabilities that are built specifically for our clients, but we also need to allow our clients to learn about them, engage with them — and then our frontline staff can support them. And that’s where the activation pieces come in. We can’t have one without the other. We need to build digital capabilities that make sense for our clients. And then we need to support them with our frontline advisors. We know that having both the digital and the human touch points with our clients creates a much deeper relationship.
“75% of our employees have completed our DigitalLearn activities prior to a capability going into market. They understand it, they can talk about it.”
As your partner, Horizn is helping make sure that the frontline and customers understand all this rapid innovation that’s coming to market. Yes. And that’s still a key thing. We see with some of those results, 75% of our employees have completed our DigitalLearn activities prior to a capability going into market. They understand it, they can talk about it. We constantly have to be monitoring to make sure that we are providing the right pieces to our clients. Do their preferences shift and change? Do their expectations? How do we evolve to continue to meet the needs of our clients? Activation is going to be key throughout all of that.
What do you see for the future?
Nobody really knows where this pandemic is going to take us. What I’m interested in as I see digital changing and becoming more important and relevant is the shift from digitizing transactional banking, which I think most of us have done within the industry, to digitizing advice. I’m looking forward to seeing that transition of digital within the banking industry.
This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity. Watch the video above to see the full version.
