October has become known as the Customer Service Month, especially in the first week. It underscores how predominant the concept of SERVICE has become in modern management. In Ghana, the concept of SERVICE has been the point of heavy discussion, particularly in financial services.

This year in particular, I reflect more deeply on TEAM SERVICE, especially as we reel in the endorsement and honour conferred on our Bank as the Best in Service for the 2022 year by the prestigious Chartered Institute of Marketing Ghana (CIMG).

I recently had to mediate and adjudicate a fraught dispute between two senior leaders in my team. The bone of contention was Net Promoter Score (NPS) and the dispute was a thorough repudiation by the leader of the team with the poor results. Ordinarily, this will not under any circumstances be a pleasant duty, and the heightened emotions on a Monday morning, would not be the ideal start to the week.

I however spent the meeting with beatific smiles, totally delighted by the dispute, to the infuriation of the aggrieved parties even more. The reason for my joy – SERVICE HAD BECOME SO IMPORTANT AS TO WARRANT A ‘FIGHT’. If senior leaders of the bank were passionately fighting about service quality scores—as opposed to being lukewarm and nonchalant, then our cultural change programme was working.

Let me explain. It has been my unalloyed honour to be a part of the leadership at Universal Merchant Bank. UMB is arguably Ghana’s oldest merchant bank, with a proud heritage of leading the way in Ghanaian Banking. Since 2015, the Bank has evolved into a universal banking franchise with an aggressive aspiration to seize the commanding heights of Ghanaian banking, as an indigenous bank. In our view this can be achieved with SERVICE (Customer centricity) as the primary growth pillar.

Why customer centricity?

Customer centricity has always been part of the posture of the bank. Since evolving into a full universal bank however, this has evolved into our key focus area, where we aspire to differentiate from other brands.

What does customer centricity mean? This simply means reimaging every single process in the bank from the point of view of the customer. This finds expression in all initiatives in the Bank, with the story of EZUPDATE serving as a good exemplar. When faced with the task of getting customers to link their Ghana Cards to their UMB accounts, the team here undertook a number of focus group discussions to discern the VOICE-OF-CUSTOMER. Based on this feedback, we developed an online platform, that enabled customers undertake the Ghana Card linkage online.

Has it been easy?

It has been tough. The cultural hurdles of embedding a service culture has been harrowing. In the first few weeks when we began this journey, I and a few leaders decided to pay a surprise visit to our contact centre. This was a service platform we were proud of and advertised aggressively. UMB had a 24/7 customer service centre. We drove to the centre around 9:00pm, laden with food to surprise the night shift and boost morale. We go there to find an empty centre. The manager of the centre, late in filling vacancies, had simply cancelled the night shift on weekends. Needless to say, I was not smiling when I dealt with this issue.

What have we learnt:

We still have a long way to go in our Customer centricity/ Service battle. In this journey we have learnt some critical lessons

- Culture eats strategy. No matter how fancy and erudite the strategic document, its success depends on embedding a culture of service from the security man/curator in the branch to the CEO.

- Service is like sin. Constant reminders are needed to prevent relapse. You need to celebrate wins and punish lapses visibly.

- Measure. What gets measured get done. NPS and CSAT surveys and a mystery shopper programme are critical. Results should be shared widely
- Digitization and self-service are key. The one big lesson in the SERVICE REVIVAL @ UMB story, is the role of digitisation as a key catalyst. In less than a year we have seen wait times on feedback channels fall from an average of 5 hours to in some instances 2 minutes because of enhanced digitisation. The EZUPDATE example I cited earlier is another example here. Overall, we find when customers have the power to give feedback or achieve resolutions digitally, it leads to better outcomes.

Back to the Fight

Finally, reason prevailed, and the two leaders calmed down enough to review the data. The numbers did not lie and we deep dived to discover what could be done to improve SERVICE in that Team. But I do not lose sight of the forest for the trees. This was a good fight, and we will continue to have strong, passionate fights like this, because we are determined to grow as a TEAM on ‘CUSTOMERCENTRICITY’.

Samuel Sakyi-Hyde

Samuel Sakyi-Hyde serves as Acting CEO at the Universal Merchant Bank. UMB is arguably Ghana’s oldest merchant bank, providing a uniquely Ghanaian perspective to Banking, since 1972. Sakyi-Hyde is passionate about service and is eager to welcome all patrons to UMB’s unique banking services.