[Jobs] Talk to Our Customers? Are You Crazy?

Thu Aug 24 11:54:45 CDT 2006

Talk to Our Customers? Are You Crazy?

David McQuillen's "experience immersion" is forcing Credit Suisse to think 
differently about its clients. For starters, there'll be no more wet grocery 
bags.

From: Issue 107 | July 2006 | Page 70 | By: Ian Wylie | Illustrations by: 
Mark Matcho Mothers in the small Swiss village of Bulach may have been wary 
of the man with a goatee staring at them as they struggled to navigate an 
ATM, grocery bag in one hand, fractious child in the other. But the man 
didn't care what their PIN numbers were or how much money they had in their 
accounts. He wanted to know, Why didn't they just put the bag down?

The answer: The bags were paper, and when the ground is wet--it rains a lot 
in Switzerland--putting them down means getting the contents soggy. Now, 
thanks to the man with the goatee, Stephan Kubler, the moms using the ATM at 
the Credit Suisse branch in Bulach can keep their groceries dry, by resting 
them on an inch-high grille.

Kubler spends each and every working day spying on Credit Suisse customers. 
He's part of a small team led by customer-experience renegade David 
McQuillen, a 36-year-old American who's challenging the top executives at 
the blue-chip Swiss bank to get out of their Zurich offices and--gulp!--meet 
some customers.

Almost every company has something about customer focus in its mission 
statement. Trouble is, the larger the organization, the more executives tend 
to insulate themselves from customers. Some rely on customer-satisfaction 
surveys and focus groups. Others simply assume that customers are just like 
them.

No, they're not, says McQuillen. And the problem with thinking they are is 
that companies end up creating products and processes that suit them, not 
their customers. "You need," he says, "to go out and talk to customers to 
find out what they want."

The "experience immersion" is his way of forcing busy executives to do just 
that. The two-hour exercise begins with a visit to three local bank 
branches. At the first branch, McQuillen teaches execs how to watch 
customers; at the second, they complete a typical customer task, such as 
exchanging foreign currency; and at the third branch, they're given a few 
questions to ask actual customers--by far the most intimidating task. Back 
in McQuillen's office, the executives visit the bank's Web site and attempt 
to check the interest rate for a mortgage or find out which bank cards can 
be used abroad. And they try to fill out credit-card application forms.

Each session, says McQuillen, yields results. Two of the branches visited 
during immersions are now being redesigned at the request of participating 
execs.

Another manager, who was forced to cool his heels in a long line, kicked off 
a project to reduce waiting time. Christoph Brunner, COO of Credit Suisse's 
private-banking unit, realized that "in some cases, we actually make it hard 
for customers to do business with us. [I saw] that little things make a big 
difference. For example, just having signage that people understand. Having 
friendly and helpful employees. As a bank, we often think that only the 
financial products themselves matter--but there is so much more that goes 
around that."

The idea for the immersion came from a presentation McQuillen made in 2004 
to 200 of the bank's senior managers. Most were paying more attention to 
their BlackBerrys until McQuillen announced he was about to make a call, 
from the stage, to a Credit Suisse service center. "I saw fear in their 
faces, because they didn't know what the experience was going to be. We have 
5 million customer interactions every month, and I realized then that if our 
senior managers didn't know what was going on in those interactions, the CEO 
probably didn't know, either." In fact, Credit Suisse CEO Ulrich Korner 
appreciated the immersion so much that he instructed all of his direct 
reports to do it too.

McQuillen's team of five currently has 19 projects, as well as the 
immersion, in progress. Some, such as helping redesign bank branches or 
prototyping clearer account statements, have been sanctioned officially. 
Others are, um, less sanctioned. When McQuillen suggested asking Plain 
English Campaign experts in London to help simplify the bank's basic-account 
application forms, the bosses said no. So he did it anyway. "We do a lot of 
stuff we think is good and then apologize later," grins McQuillen.

"You can do this stuff in two or three days. You don't have to spend half a 
million dollars on research. Just go and observe."He has also decided, 
unilaterally, that the bank should be doing more to help customers with 
disabilities use its branches, offices, Web sites, and call centers. The 
average age of Credit Suisse private-banking clients is 67--yet in 
conservative Switzerland, there's little legal compulsion for companies to 
make products or services accessible, as is the case in the United States or 
much of Europe.

So McQuillen made each member of his team spend a day in a wheelchair. Then 
he invited 50 of the bank's senior managers to an event in May during which 
they were made to spend time in a wheelchair, wear a weighted suit made to 
re-create what it's like to be 70, and eat lunch in the dark, courtesy of 
Zurich's Blind Cow restaurant, where all of the waiting staff are visually 
impaired.

Recruited at the height of the dotcom boom to help build a Web site for 
wealthy private clients, McQuillen was a hair's-breadth away from being 
fired after the bubble burst. But he hung on, convincing a colleague that he 
could help with new branch projects. Now, although still regarded as a 
maverick, he has freedom to take on projects across the bank. Customers seem 
impressed: "I don't understand [why] other banks have yet to do this," says 
a corporate client in Zurich. And companies such as ABN Amro, Capital One, 
Safeco, and Telecom New Zealand are interested in learning about the 
immersion process themselves.

McQuillen just grins and shakes his head. What he does, he says, is really 
pretty simple. "I'd like to make it sound like we're using rigorous science, 
but we make it up as we go along and stick with the things that work.

"You can do this stuff in two or three days--you don't have to spend half a 
million dollars on research. Just go and observe."

Ian Wylie is a Fast Company contributing writer in London.

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