Together with Ümran Akbulut, Customer Experience Manager at İş Bank, our CEO Gurol Kurt spoke to Efma’s Boris Plantier about the origins of our successful collaboration.
How did the two of you meet?
Ümran Akbulut: For İş Bank, a well-known and highly respected bank with 25,000 employees, the delivery of world-class customer experience is of prime importance. We had been looking for a solution that could help us measure and manage customer experience across all channels and customer journeys. Then, we came across Alterna CX at a conference.
Gürol Kurt: Çağlar Göğüş, Alterna CX co-founder, was speaking at this conference. Following his speech, Çağlar met with Ümran Akbulut who is leading the customer experience team at İş Bank. It was apparent that the Alterna CX solution could be a good candidate to address İş Bank’s needs. In a few weeks, we met with the rest of the customer experience team at İş Bank.
What made you realize that you were perfectly matched?
Ümran Akbulut: It took us several dates to nurture our relationship. During these early dates, we discussed with Alterna CX how to scale up a customer experience program in our organization. Our ideas evolved around the need to establish an NPS (net promoter score) program where we can capture transaction-specific customer feedback across all journeys and touchpoints including branches, Internet, mobile banking, ATMs and the contact center. With its reliable and scalable capabilities as a single platform, Alterna CX proved to be an ideal match.
Gürol Kurt: We built Alterna CX as an end-to-end solution that can address the needs of a large corporation such as İş Bank on customer experience measurement with a large scale implementation across all channels. We were very excited from the beginning about the prospect of working together with İş Bank.
What is the fruit of your relationship?
Ümran Akbulut: It is now possible for us to get real-time insights into what’s happening in the field. We can drill down on CX performance even to the deepest layers. We can assign and keep track of NPS targets for each customer interacting with employees. İş Bank employees are energized with the feedback given to them by the specific customers they served. The feedback received on digital and mobile banking channels helps us to continuously improve our digital experience.
Gürol Kurt: We believe that the fruit of our relationship is our long-term strategic partnership that benefits İş Bank customers. Abilities such as measuring customer satisfaction everywhere and in real-time, alerting and triggering actions when needed result in continuous improvement in CX performance and directly benefit İş Bank customers.
What makes your relationship work?
Ümran Akbulut: The Alterna CX team has an in-depth background in customer experience management and we can benefit from this know-how when needed. They are very open to feedback about how we would like to use the solution and customize it to meet our needs. Both İş Bank and Alterna CX teams are very keen on making this engagement a success.
Gürol Kurt: We are indeed eager to ensure that İş Bank gets the most benefit from Alterna CX utilization. The feedback we receive from İş Bank helps us to fine-tune the product to better address banking-specific needs in CX management.
What are your plans for the future?
Gürol Kurt: We think of our relationship as a special partnership that goes beyond a typical vendor/client relationship. In this partnership, we see Alterna CX as a core system of İş Bank that addresses all the needs of the bank’s customer experience program in a single platform. Going forward, we would like to equip the bank with the most advanced capabilities in CX management including natural language processing on open-ended customer feedback and predictive analytics on satisfaction.
Ümran Akbulut: We will be working closely together with the Alterna CX team in order to have all branch and digital channels owners of İş Bank use this platform, and have the customer experience insight generated by Alterna CX to provide guidance to our employees in making improvements regarding our bank’s performance in the eyes of our customers.
This interview was officially published on https://www.efma.com/article/detail/31595
