2019 AWARD FINALIST SPOTLIGHT: Bank of America - Finalist in the Operational Excellence to deliver an outstanding Customer Experience Excellence category

Read this article about Bank of America, one of our finalists, in the category Best Achievement in Operational Excellence to deliver an outstanding Customer Experience Excellence, selected by the independent judging panel, for the 2019 Business Transformation & Operational Excellence Industry Awards program. Click here to read articles on other finalists.

Bank of America launched a transformational program called Voices to expand the quantity, quality and timeliness of feedback from our clients and share it across our businesses. Since launch in late 2017, we have received 13 million survey responses, 6 million of which include direct client verbatim. In one year, Voices helped drive a 3.7% increase in our overall client satisfaction.

Bank of America Voices covers 67 million consumer and small business clients and provides over 50,000 client-facing employees with a daily dashboard that offers real-time feedback about their performance.

The implementation of this program involved survey redesign, migration from six different vendors to a single platform, installation of a rules-based decision engine to optimize sampling, and the introduction of dashboards providing real-time feedback to employees at every level.

Voices delivered an almost immediate improvement in client feedback driven by changes in employee behavior. And, the real-time feedback enhanced our culture of coaching and recognition and enabled employees to see how their actions drive satisfaction.

Overall benefits of our client feedback strategy:

• Consolidation to a single vendor has increased control throughout the process by reducing over-surveying and improving our understanding of client satisfaction across contact centers, financial centers and mobile banking.
• Since the launch, we have seen a 3.7% improvement in overall client satisfaction across the Consumer and Small Business organization.
• Voices has helped reduce variability and enabled real-time feedback and coaching so employees can consistently exceed client expectations.
• Our volume of survey responses jumped 140% and our response rate increased more than 130%! The increase in responses, partially driven by shortening and simplifying surveys, provides employees with more actionable feedback.
• Improved timeliness of feedback has enhanced the rate of behavioral change and accountability. Before Voices, feedback was commonly delivered at the site/team level after a lengthy time lag. Now, over 50,000 frontline employees receive real-time feedback in personalized client experience dashboards. They can recall interactions and recognize what they did well and how they can improve. And, managers can provide specific, timely coaching.
• Through journey surveys we are able to gather client feedback at multiple touch points during significant life events (e.g. the home buying process) and engage the client if they experience dissatisfaction through the process.
• The collection of feedback across multiple channels allows us to identify root causes of client dissatisfaction and integrate learnings in product and process improvements.
• Our closed-loop process enables us to identify dissatisfied clients by analyzing their feedback and to alert managers to contact them to resolve outstanding issues or concerns.
• Our financial centers have delivered some of the most significant client satisfaction improvements.
• Greatest single-year increase in client satisfaction – current scores are at an all-time high.
• 95% of centers are receiving scores of 9 or 10 from clients more than 80% of the time – two years ago 40% of our centers were exceeding 80% satisfaction levels.

• We have also seen tremendous improvements in satisfaction across our small business clients where 100% of small business markets now exceed 80% satisfaction levels.