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Paul Legutko
Senior Principal and Director of Customer Experience, Aite-Novarica Group
Age: 50
Industry experience: 18 years
Even before the pandemic, the “Amazon effect,” had changed consumers’ expectations about how they interact with companies, and Paul Legutko wants to help banks, credit unions and other financial institutions rethink these interactions. As director of customer experience at Aite-Novarica Group, Legutko leads a new research practice at the Boston-based advisory firm that provides a framework companies can use to adopt or improve strategies around customer experience. As consumers interact with banks and credit unions through multiple channels, Legutko said, analyzing experiences from the customer’s perspective can provide a competitive advantage to community-based institutions.
Legutko’s career has seen him work with survey research, website analytics, customer analytics, big data and customer-facing technologies. He spent time at Ernst & Young and Hill Holiday before joining Novarica, which merged with Aite Group last summer. Legutko has just authored a free report available through Aite-Novarica called “Understanding Customer Experience: A CX Framework.”
“You can have a fantastic customer experience built on top of a terrible business process and vice versa.”
Q: What is the current state of customer experience?
A: For a lot of smaller community banks, credit unions and regional banks, everyone knows that they need to focus on customer experience. Just in the last year, 70 percent of the institutions that we surveyed recently said that budgets had increased for customer experience. Leadership recognizes that it’s something they need to take seriously. In talking to a lot of companies that are new to it, they don’t know where to turn; they don’t know where to start. Unlike something like marketing, which has been around for hundreds of years, customer experience is a relatively new discipline.
Q: What needs to be fixed about customer experience?
A: Customer experience teams tend to devolve into two habits, sort of paths of least resistance. One path that some teams will go down is they will equate customer experience with internal business process. You’ll have a workshop; you’ll talk about the customer experience; you’ll say, “We have a terrible experience around bill payment because we have really bad internal processes.” Then the focus becomes fixing those processes. But fixing the business problem is not same thing as fixing customer experience. You can have a fantastic customer experience built on top of a terrible business process and vice versa.
The other pitfall is to rely on a quick-bought solution. The vendor landscape for customer experience is very rich out there. The temptation – again, the path of least resistance – is for a CIO or someone who’s in charge of customer experience to say, “I’m going to invest in this technology because this vendor says that they can fix everything.” That’s good, because you probably are going to have to invest in technology. But again, you’re losing your focus on the customer in customer experience by focusing instead on a technological solution. It may well be that you don’t need a particular technology to fix something that’s very simple. So, those two temptations are what we see in the current state, which is why we wanted to develop a framework that put the customer back at the center of this.
Q: What does it mean to put the customer back at the center?
A: It means thinking about all of the pieces of the customer journey from the point of view of the customer rather than the point of view of a platform or a business process or internal silos. What that means is thinking about the sum total of the experiences: What are the touchpoints that I have with my customers and how do I categorize them? It means doing your traditional journey-mapping exercises, taking the customer’s point of view, stepping in their shoes and seeing what the journey is actually like. But it is also about assessing that journey against what consumer expectations are today. Do I have closure at the end of this experience? Do I have direction when I’m finished?
It also means thinking about what the customer is expecting in their own head during this experience. How personalized does the customer expect it to be? How much of a human touch does the customer expect? Finally, it’s about measurement: How do you measure the experience from the point of view of what it is that the customer is trying to accomplish? A lot of times experiences are not about a transaction.
Q: What role will the research practice have with clients?
A: After the two companies merged last year, we were thinking about where we can invest, what kind of research we could provide on a topic – something that all industries care about. That’s why we selected customer experience, because it’s something that everyone sees the importance of.
There are three pillars to understanding customer experience – you need to understand what people do, what people think and what the competition out there is doing. The “what people do” is about behavioral analytics. The “what people think” is about voice of the customer – surveys, social media monitoring, collecting feedback after a phone experience or on the website. And then “what other people are doing” is one of the traditional strengths of the Aite-Novarica Group – industry research, competitive benchmarking, what kind of capabilities other banks are providing. We’re also putting together a group of what we’re calling charter advisers. These are industry professionals – bankers, insurance professionals – who are stakeholders in customer experience and are going to help us understand where the gaps are and where the pain points are as we figure out our research agenda for the rest of the year.
Diane McLaughlin
Q: What are you most looking forward to as you launch the new framework and research practice?
A: I’m really excited about having the conversations with bankers and insurers. I get a lot out of these conversations. I like to hear what’s happening out there; I like to hear what the pain points are and what people are excited about. It’s a field that I’ve been doing for a long time. One of the nice things about being a consultant is that you get to see what an entire industry is doing rather than just one company. Having those conversations and being able to wrap a piece of research around them is something that I’m looking forward to quite a bit.
Legutko’s Five Favorite Restaurants
- The Mooring in Newport, Rhode Island
- Ristorante Simposium in Paestum, Italy
- L’Entrecôte in Bordeaux, France
- Ristorante Vecchia Roma in Rome, Italy
- The Newes from America in Edgartown
