How Citigroup Delivers the Right Kind of Global Customer Experience

In celebration of the recent 15th Call Center Week, let's take a retro look at a piece from our 12th Call Center Week.

It is 8AM local time, and your important overseas business meeting is a half hour away. Needing that extra rush of energy to power through this corporate interaction, you rush to the nearest Starbucks to order your favorite coffee.

Already in a rush and dependent on your pick-me-up of choice to transform you from a grumpy, tired brute longing for an extra few hours in bed into a suave, confident executive who can make the impossible happen, imagine finding out that this particular Starbucks has a different line system, a different menu and different-tasting coffee.

"Disappointment" would potentially represent the understatement of the year. Now replace "Starbucks" with "Citigroup" and "coffee" with "millions of dollars in financial assets" and imagine how bleak things could look.

With efficient service across multiple channels emerging as a paramount priority for virtually all customer management leaders, Adriana Torres, Citigroup Global Consumer Bank's global contact center head and managing director, stressed the simultaneous importance of global customer service consistency at the 12^th Annual Call Center Week in Las Vegas, NV, held June 13-17, 2011.

During her Wednesday morning keynote at the industry-leading conference for call center and customer service executives and innovators, Torres revealed that successful globalization requires far more than a desire to reap the rewards of emerging markets or even a knowledge of how your business fits into the local markets—it requires an ability to understand and develop a globally-consistent response to a host of resulting customer service challenges.

"Global clients expect that you know them and that your [solutions] are going to meet their needs not only where they live but globally," explains Torres. "They want to be able to access their [accounts] from any place in the world at any time. And they want consistency of services."

With the rise of social media and other interactive channels spurring an increased demand for personal relationships on the part of customers, achieving customer satisfaction is already becoming a challenge of immense complexity. Adding a global layer significantly exacerbates the challenge.

Customers not only "want to know that you know them and that you recognize them" across the globe but also "want the same type of capabilities in any country they go." And while the rise of digital customer interaction undoubtedly makes standardization of processes technologically simpler, it cannot account for the breadth of reality—different geographic and cultural regions produce varying market environments, and the resulting internal and external obstacles can make implementing a one-size-fits-all approach nearly appear very daunting for many organizations

"How do you balance the specific country needs with the global strategy you need to drive?" asked Torres, noting that each country produces its own, specific markets, consumers, P&L, management style and products. Even those with a global strategy still "have to be able to manage the local needs and [the] local environment."

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Torres knows all about the challenges. Finance, the world in which Torres operates, produces very significant hurdles in the form of regulations.

She explained, "We are very regulated. We not only have global policies but have to follow local regulations," adding that cross-border account opening is particularly burdensome since "each country has its own regulatory requirements." Barriers on delivering what Citi customers hope to experience no matter where they manage and access their accounts is not simply a matter of logistics—in many cases, it is a matter of law.

As a result of the regulatory hurdle, as well as challenges on the process front, the language front and the cultural front, ideal standardization, Torres acknowledged, has not yet been attained by the financial giant. She noted that Citi has not yet solidified a perfectly-global product portfolio and that the technological infrastructure is not "100% standardized."

Yet Citi views continued, successful penetration into global markets as a cornerstone of its strategy—especially alongside Torres' data that billions of potential global customers do not have access to financial services (and are basically customers waiting to be acquired). She, therefore, was not content to focus simply on why proper customer management consistency cannot be achieved and instead provided advice and insight on the necessary steps to take for the development of a valuable, consistent global customer strategy.

One tenet of her advice that should be on the radar of all customer service leaders is the need for integration of all global channels with an adjoining "360 view" of the engagements. So many organizations are prioritizing systems for comparing customer interactions across channels like social media, email and phone, but if they do not assure the viewpoint extends globally, they will cripple their execution of consistent, personalized service across borders.

Approaching global initiatives as team projects is a fundamental component of Torres' approach to global customer strategy, as the strategy assures that there is not only consistency of reporting, innovation and execution but a feedback mechanism for understanding how the individual markets are absorbing the initiatives.

"I drive most of our global initiatives through teams...I always invite representatives from countries or regions to participate and share...This is an opportunity to leverage the resources by using the approach of teams," detailed Torres.

That is not to suggest that every process needs to be fragmented into micro-level components. Where possible, Torres advocates consolidation of processes and explained that Citi often relies on central cultural hubs to accomplish tasks for regional operations.

Such hubs provide an easier means of achieving another essential pillar of Torres' global customer management strategy—the development of consistent performance and workflow measurements. Segmented, local benchmarks effectively guarantee the global workforce will be unable to provide a consistent customer experience, providing a significant counter to the intent of globalization. With a more consistent point of operations, workforce management will subsequently be more consistent.

Hubs that can contextualize standardized performance metrics for specific markets are therefore invaluable, but the need to synchronize performance measurement exists regardless. Citi has embraced this reality, and roughly three-quarters of the measures on its call center scorecards are standardized across the globe.

Making your business relevant within each global market of operation has long been accepted as a "common sense" component of globalization. But as customer demands for global, interactive, personalized service begin to overshadow the simple desire for effective, culturally-appropriate service at the regional level, leaders like Torres reveal that it is no longer enough to make your business fit into each region. Rather, global customer management strategies must focus on how to replicate the components of successful local service across the globe and without conflict.