Barclaycard officials use terms such as values-led, innovative, collaborative, engage, delight, and grow. Redefining the customer experience lies at the heart of their mission.
Barclaycard US is one of the fastest growing top-10 credit card issuers in the nation. The company creates customized, co-branded credit card programs for some of the country’s most successful travel, entertainment, retail, affinity and financial institutions.
Earlier this month at the third annual Loyalty360 CX Awards at the 6th annual Engagement & Experience Expo presented by Loyalty360, Barclaycard walked away with the following honors: Bronze Award in the Customer Insights category, Silver Award in the Employee Engagement category, Bronze Award in the Return on CX category, and a Bronze Award in the comprehensive 360-Degree CX Award category.
Bill Rigler, vice president customer experience group lead, Barclaycard, told Loyalty360 that through the company’s customer insights strategy, “we’re aiming to redefine Customer Experience to new levels within the industry. Our overarching objective with using customer insights is to fuel step-change customer experience improvements in our quest to be the go-to payments provider in the U.S. We’re in the age of the customer, where good isn’t good enough, and where customers have many choices. It’s important for organizations to push innovation everywhere we can to stay both competitive and leading edge.”
Barclaycard has taken standard, non-complex reporting for some of its Voice-of-the-Customer metrics, such as complaints, and built out a suite of next-level thinking, innovate decision-making tools to assist the organization.
Rigler noted the creation of the Cost of a Complaint was created to help enrich the company’s CX business cases.
“Now we can use a tool such as this to help drive a project’s funding and prioritizing solely by this innovative way of looking at CX ROI,” he said. “Through understanding operating expense and customer behaviors we can formulate how much a complaint costs the organization. Our company has on many occasions forwent short-term revenue gain to foster long-term customer trust and loyalty.”
To accomplish this, Barclaycard’s business focus is squarely on its customers.
“From the frontline agent to the CEO, the organization has embraced the need to act and think differently about the customer experience,” Rigler explained. “Our journey to gain customer trust and loyalty is grounded in one simple principle: Treating the customer the way we want to be treated. This requires us to listen intently to the voice of our customers, understand their needs and act on their feedback. With this focus, the organization has created the first-ever crowd-sourced credit card and has made it easier and more enjoyable for our customers to do business with us.”
How does Barclaycard listen?
“We start our day with the Voice of the Customer,” Rigler said. “Our Customer Experience team sends out a call prior to the opening of business each day to all exempt level employees–from our executive team down through business line managers. The calls were played to assist in highlighting both positive and opportunistic experiences we’re providing to our customers. For the opportunistic experiences, it’s a great platform to ignite cross-functional dialogue about how the organization can work collaboratively to change the experience. This program also exposes non-customer facing colleagues to the emotional aspects of customer issues. This deep insight has accelerated our improvement activities, changed the status quo, removed silo-driven activity, and made everyone accountable to the customer.”