How BofA Sifts Real-time Feedback to Refine CX and Spot Opportunities

More and more of Bank of America’s interaction with consumers and small businesses is digital, both via electronic services and through interaction with the bank’s virtual assistant, Erica. Yet BofA continues to invest in branches and considers in-person banking an essential part of the mix.

Responsible for tying all three facets of the bank together is the company’s customer care function, which looks at delivery and customer satisfaction through an integrated, seamless lens. And central to that job is “Voices,” the bank’s persistent and ubiquitous customer experience evaluation system.

Need to Know:

• Bank of America introduced “Voices” in 2018. The platform sends millions of email surveys annually to customers to gauge how well BofA bankers, Erica and digital services are hitting the mark. The system touches hundreds of thousands of customers daily.
• Voices delivers performance feedback that’s quickly available at every level, from broad management-level perspectives down to individual customer-serving employees.
• The system is designed to provide both positive and negative feedback, giving bankers, supervisors and managers perspective on both wins and the opportunities for improvement.

The bank prefers to get a wide-angle view. For example, interactions with Erica, which straddles multiple pathways.

“Just putting new capabilities, out there on their own, in isolation, is not the experience we’re looking for,” says Ashley Ross, the bank’s head of consumer client experience and governance, who oversees Voices. She says the bank is really looking at the client journey, “in terms of what the client is trying to accomplish end to end.”

“Erica may connect clients with a live chart or a phone call with one of our bankers, or it may schedule an in-person appointment in one of our financial centers,” says Ross.

Read more: BofA Pivots Branches to Deliver Customer Consultations Over Transactions

How BofA’s ‘Voices’ Works

The bank’s system, built on a platform from Medallia, seeks customer ratings for all interactions on the same 1-10 scale, for the sake of comparability. This includes satisfaction with the transaction that’s just happened, and whether the customer would recommend the bank to someone else. Beyond the numerical rating, customers are also asked for verbal comments.

Both ratings and comments are analyzed and poured into visual interfaces designed for ready understanding. Ross says Voices refines “hundreds of millions of datapoints” into understandable findings.

Pushing feedback to where it matters. She says a key strength of the Voices system is that it surfaces issues and improvements to folks beyond her customer experience team.

“The real culture change is when you get those visuals into the hands of every teammate in the organization,” says Ross. “The people who actually serve the clients day in and day out have access to those dashboards too, which drives the culture throughout the organization.”

Voices incorporates practical application in a related program called “Follow Ups.”

“If a client gives you feedback and indicates that there’s a follow-up needed, we absolutely follow-up to make sure the need is met,” says Ross.

The bank isn’t just looking for shortfalls and complaints. Ross says positive comments are very motivational to bank staffers. When they learn via Voices that something they did really made a difference to a customer, “it can provide that spring in their step, and validation with their clients,” she explains.

Read more: What Banks Can Learn from BofA’s Multi-Billion Dollar AI Bet