Digital transformation doesn’t touch only companies in the
U.S. or Western Europe. Many Russian firms made efforts to incorporate digital
into their business models. Take Sberbank, for example. This is the largest
universal bank in the country with approximately 330 000 employees, $39.2
Billion market cap and close to 17000 branch offices. It now has over 30
million active users of online banking system Sberbank Online, 18 million
active users of Sberbank Online App for smartphones and over 90000 ATMs and
self-service kiosks.
Being a universal bank in Russia means that you have to
serve very diverse customer groups—from senior citizens-- who want interaction
with a human customer service representatives and are not comfortable with the
technology -- to digital natives who want mobile banking without much human
interaction.
Elderly customers (i.e. 60 year old +) represent a large
proportion of the bank’s clients. These customers don’t use Internet banking
and even have trouble using self-service terminals in the branch offices to pay
utility bills. How to make sure that the bank’s staff is always willing to help
the elderly to navigate the terminals? One can run customer satisfaction
surveys or develop KPIs for serving elderly clients and reprimand employees who
are not helpful. Alternatively, one can work on improving the staff’s empathy
with the elderly so that the associates are willing to assist without specific
KPIs or a fear of reprimand from the top management.
To address this issue, Sberbank has developed a powerful
virtual reality tool called Empathy for its staff. With a use of headphones and
Samsung VR headset, a young branch associate can actually “become” an elderly
client of her own bank. The bank worked with a team of psychologists and doctors
to understand how a seventy-year-old person may perceive the world, given his (or
her) poor health condition and declining motoric skills. When inside the
program, you have the visual and sensory experience of an elderly person. You
have to orient yourself inside the bank’s branch office, seek advice from a
not-very-friendly Sberbank associate, figure out how to punch the numbers on
the self-service payment kiosk. At the same time, you battle blurry vision (due
to eye disease), noise in the years (due to high blood pressure), hands that
lost their dexterity (due to arthritis) and occasional bumps into younger
customers who don’t understand why you stand in the middle of the branch
looking for help. The experience is extremely powerful and helps branch office
employees to develop empathy towards seniors’ frequent inability to understand
the technology and they become more willing to help. As a positive side effect,
this experience helps young bank associates to feel more empathy for their own
elderly relatives as well.
What about younger customers who tend to think of Sberbank
as a boring place where their grandparents go to open savings accounts and pay
their bills? Russia now has a few brunch-less banks targeting digital natives
and Sberbank needs to change its perception of being a traditional bank in the
eyes of this customer group. 2016 was a year of Pokemon Go and a small team of
Sberbank’s executives decided to use the game to attract millennials to its
branch offices. In 3 days, the team created a new insurance product called
“Sberbank Go”. Every Russian citizen who hunted for Pokemons could sign up for
insurance that covers medical costs in case of an accident. That is, if you
walk into a street lamp pole while looking for Pikachu and hurt your leg, Sberbank
insurance will help you pay your medical bill. In addition, Sberbank put Pokestops
inside some of its branch offices to attract virtual eggs and Poke Balls. This
helped game’s fans to capture more Pokemon if they visited Sberbank.
While this initiative sounds a bit silly, the objectives were
very serious: increase awareness among the younger customers about the bank’s
insurance products, its loyalty program and mobile payment solutions. The
project was run in 27 branch offices across Russia. The results were very good.
There was huge buzz in the Russian social networks about the campaign and the
TV channels run stories about it. This was free publicity. At the end, 130
million individuals have heard about the initiative, journalists and bloggers
wrote about 10 000 articles, the dedicated website (SberbankGo.ru) received 70
000 visits and the bank issued 6500 insurance policies to customers with the
average age of 24 years old. In addition, 12 out of 27 branch offices with
Pokestops experienced visible increase in physical traffic during the month of
July, i.e. the period when traffic normally decreases due to the vacation lull.
How to make your company more open to digital
transformation? Sberbank’s answer lies in raising awareness of opportunities
among senior executives and empowering lower level employees. The bank’s CEO German
Gref and his top management team became aware of the Virtual Reality’s
potential to teach empathy while visiting the Virtual Human Interaction Lab in
Stanford University. The CEO and his team realized the importance of agile
approach in developing new products, and they created the organizational
culture inside Sberbank that allows for small scale experimentation. This
helped the emergence of SberbankGo and many similar digital initiatives. Ultimately,
the embrace of digital technologies helps the bank to better service the
elderly while appearing hip to the young.
Shorter version of this article was published in French by Les Echos
