Supporting major change at RBS

Alasdair supported the UK Retail Internal Communications team in a range of ways from 2009 to 2013.

One key programme was the adoption of multi-channel banking across the retail bank, and developing communication strategies that would help to bring to life new ways of working the bank was looking to adopt.

Like many large organisations, RBS had worked in silos – telephone and contact centres had different ways of working to the branch network, and digital and ‘direct channels’ were comparatively new, with growing customer demand.

RBS recognised that it had to recover from a period of underinvestment in the network at the same time as it continued to report large losses. The multi-channel strategy was a clear articulation of how each channel needed to evolve to meet distinct customer requirements and habits, and how channels could work together and complement each other, rather than compete. The communication approach Alasdair recommended was to personalise these, increase advocacy for other channels (especially digital), and to take away the fear of consequences.

What we did

Alasdair helped develop a simple messaging framework on ‘ways to bank – what’s your choice?’ – for branches, online, phone and mobile. Reflecting the different customer requirements internally, there were four elements to the campaign:

1. Establishing a regular drumbeat of information and features so news on ‘ways to bank’ became mainstream – new app launches, customer feedback, etc. This included using the retail bank’s monthly TV programme “Frontline” to show how customers wanted and needed to interact with the bank for different types of requirement, from arranging student loans through to changing mortgages.
2. Marking the ‘big moments’ with more impactful communication – e.g. high-profile competitions for a new iPhone or Android app release and celebrating the one-millionth mobile customer.

3. Providing tools for frontline staff to help customers and share good practice with their colleagues. For newly-appointed banking hall co-ordinators, an iPad app was developed, both as a tool for customer conversations and to enable in-app conversations with people in the same role elsewhere, to share stories and to seek help for how to overcome particular questions and issues.
4. Directly encouraging frontline employee use of channels through a targeted competition and payslip challenge. This was to help employees – often with many years of service – to embrace the new technologies themselves and encourage those that were sceptical of their benefits to try them out – and hopefully become strong advocates to customers.

This approach was designed to help the Retail Bank keep ahead of rapidly changing customer trends and to ensure employees could embrace this in how they worked.

Judging by customer ratings of the advances in digital, it worked, and the whole Digital team was recognised through an Innovation Award from the RBS Chairman.