Relationship-Focused Model: digital technology enhanced by local empowerment

Joint interview: Xavier Malherbet, Chief Executive of the Centre Loire Regional Bank, and Claire-Lise Hurlot, Group Director of Customer Relationships

The Relationship-Focused Model, at the heart of the Crédit Agricole group’s strategy, aims to help us build 100% human-centric relationships on the ground. In this joint interview, Xavier Malherbet, Chief Executive of the Centre Loire Regional Bank, and Claire-Lise Hurlot, Group Director of Customer Relationships, tell us more about the three fundamental pillars of the Relationship-Focused Model.

How can the Crédit Agricole group achieve relationship excellence, a key element of the Group Project?

Xavier Malherbet, Chief Executive of the Centre Loire Regional Bank: Relationship excellence means aiming for excellence in all our relations with our customers. This is one way to achieve our goal of becoming the bank of choice for individuals, small businesses and corporates. You might say it’s the next thing to aim for after customer satisfaction, where the aim is to become the number one bank recommended by customers. This means we need to go even further by giving customers a unique and differentiating human-centric experience. But to achieve this goal, relationship excellence has to become a priority for everyone, all the time. We have everything we need to succeed – all we need to do is put it into practice in our day-to-day work.

Claire-Lise Hurlot, Group Director of Customer Relationships: Achieving relationship excellence is the very essence of our Customer Project, which is structured around four key shared actions, the first three of which are ensuring that customers are always listened to within our various entities, implementing a new CA relationship-focused model by offering excellent management practices and relationship postures, and organising a Group-wide plan of attack to address irritants. The fourth action aims to roll out the Relationship Excellence Academy, within each of our entities, to a network of over 80 Customer Champions, most of whom are Deputy Chief Executives. These champions represent the voice of the customer and promote a culture of relationship excellence within their entities.

The first pillar of the relationship-focused model is based on relational and management postures and practices. It lies at the intersection between the Customer Project and the Human-Centric Project: can you explain its key principles and how it is being rolled out?

XM: This pillar is built around the principle of symmetry of attention, which says that if a business wants to achieve relationship excellence, it must care as much about its employees as it does about its customers. So we’ve put together a set of relational and management postures and practices designed to help make the employee experience just as good as the experience we ask employees to give their customers. This management component is fully aligned with the work being carried out and trialled under the Human-Centric Project. It will help us permanently embed our relationship-focused model, which is destined to evolve over time.

The second reason is that one of the mantras of the Human-Centric Project is local empowerment. To help ensure our customers have this kind of experience, the relationship-focused model relies on the situational and emotional intelligence of each and every one of our employees. Each employee will choose the most appropriate way to respond to any given situation.

CLH: The pilot, involving five Regional Banks, identified five relationship-focused practices and five management practices found to be particularly transformative. These practices are considered the core of our relationship-focused model. They will be rolled out to all the Regional Banks to become the hallmark of our approach to relationships and management. As regards other practices, each Regional Bank can choose which ones it wants to adopt in keeping with its corporate plan and needs.

To support our 39 Regional Banks through this transformation, we’re suggesting that those that want to carry out a self-assessment of the maturity of their relational, management and digital practices. The findings will help them determine the ideal time to roll out the relationship-focused model. They’ll be able to opt for one of four waves of rollout in 2021 and will be supported by Crédit Agricole S.A.’s Customer and Human Development team and training through IFCAM, the Group’s university.

The second pillar of the relationship-focused model is the omnichannel advice approach. Could you outline its key principles, objectives and implementation timeline?

XM: The omnichannel advice approach enables employees to support their customers over the long haul in a holistic and personalised way. This means making use of the full range of channels available to them, including the branch, customer relationship centres, e-mail and instant messaging, and so on, as well as leveraging all digital interactions with customers (through the New Customer Portal, applications, the website, etc.). This approach is fully aligned with the Group Project. Once again, the goal is to differentiate ourselves through the excellence of our approach to advice and to strengthen our role as a partner bank that helps its customers and society fulfil their plans.

CLH: I sometimes draw a parallel between the kind of close relationship you might have with your doctor and the principles underpinning the omnichannel advice approach. The objective is to make the advice process a “trust-based exchange” characterised by total transparency and fairness, consistent with our cooperative values. This is very much inspired by the “Trajectoire Patrimoine” approach: both 100% human and 100% digital. We began co-development work on the approach in September 2020. This involved many interviews and workshops with customers, advisors, managers and subsidiaries as well as Crédit Agricole S.A.’s markets. Information gathered through this work is currently in the process of being consolidated. A pilot involving six Regional Banks and seven subsidiaries is scheduled to start in March. Depending on the results, the approach could be extended to the whole of the Group in late 2021.

Could you tell us about the “excellence priorities” that make up the third pillar of the relationship-focused model?

XM: The excellence priorities are relational commitments that customers consider important and differentiating. We’ve put the emphasis on three commitments with a decisive impact on customer satisfaction: reachability, proactivity and recognition of loyalty.

As well as enabling customers to contact us through whichever channel they choose, the reachability commitment means working together to respond quickly to customers’ requests. Proactivity means anticipating customers’ needs by adopting an ultra-personalised and human-centric relationship approach. This adds genuine value in a digital world and perfectly embodies our promise to deliver “Digital technology enhanced by local empowerment”. The third excellence priority is about recognising customers’ loyalty to Crédit Agricole.

CLH: The Regional Banks are already working on co-developing and improving their practices in terms of reachability and proactivity across all markets.

Starting this year, we’ll be determining shared objectives and organisational and relational recommendations (issued, in particular, by Regional Banks) on the subject of reachability.

As regards proactivity, advisor/manager labs are kicking off in February with the aim of identifying relevant human actions that will be tested at five pilot Regional Banks and LCL in the second quarter of 2021. Feedback should be available in the second half of this year.

Meanwhile, we will be engaging in co-development work with the Regional Banks and User Divisions on recognising loyalty. This work will look at various potential scenarios, with the aim of rolling something out in 2022.

Key project implementation phases and initial feedback

Twenty-five Regional Banks have been signed up to implement and roll out the Relationship-Focused Model. Six of them co-developed the project and four piloted it.
Alongside this, “relationship-focused practices” labs were rolled out in the regions, involving 230 employees across all markets. Around 3,000 customers were involved in iteratively developing relational and management practices, including both a common core and practices tailored to each individual Regional Bank.
Watch the video to hear from:
• Isabelle Augrain, BMDP and Regional Banks Support Director, Crédit Agricole S.A., who details key phases in project implementation: the pre-rollout phase to allow each Regional Bank to personalise its relationship-focused model; the pilot phase lasting several months; and large-scale rollout.• Stéphane Corbin, Assistant Manager of the Atlantique Vendée Regional Bank’s La Roche online branch, who reviews practices implemented, such as the art of apologising• Romain Leyrit, Customer Advisor with the Centre France Regional Bank, who talks about the near-immediate buy-in to and success of these practices and the good results they have produced.• Régis Castex, Head of Small Business Finance with the Aquitaine Regional Bank, who particularly emphasises the importance of showing how the relationship-focused model designed for customers can be transposed to retail banking advisors.

Initial feedback is very promising, with customers feeling “more confident” about investing with the Bank, staff “enjoying their work again, with everyone joining in the pursuit of relationship excellence” and managers finding that “momentum is building again”.

For example, in Aquitaine, an improvement in CRI scores in pilot areas was measured across a number of points, including in particular a 10% increase in the number of “promoter” customers since January 2020.

Seeing satisfaction convert into recommendations in this way is a very positive sign for the model’s continued rollout.