RBS Case Study

Royal Bank of Scotland and Expression for Growth

Enabling effective relationships & enhancing value for customers

RBS asked Expression for Growth to design an approach to enhance the strategic relationship building and sales management skills of their population of (Senior) Relationship Directors within the Corporate Institutional Banking (CIB) division.

Following the collapse of the banking industry, there was a need for banks to review and change their approach so that customers became their main focus. Like many other banks at this time, RBS were experiencing poor levels of customer satisfaction, low share of wallet, few or no consistent approaches or processes to selling, and a lack of coaching culture with in the business. Their people looked at things from an internal and silo-ed perspective and were very product focused-offering generic solutions without any real strategic-thinking or in-depth customer understanding.

Results showed that RBS could no longer assume that their reputation would win them business. They decided to make a fundamental change and to put the customer at the centre of their operation. The goal was to find ways to deliver more value to customers and so create a competitive advantage for RBS in the market. The overall aim of the programme was for the population to embrace a new and effective way of working, utilising the existing range of available M I tools with in the business, resulting in much stronger strategic relationships with customers. By achieving true customer intimacy RBS aimed to maximise opportunities and become the natural first port of call for any customers with banking needs.

Key focus areas were:

• Create a step-change in behaviours
• Become more customer-centric
• Break down silos to work collaboratively and effectively
• Create the confidence to ask questions
• Introduce a consistent process, across the business, for customer engagement

Expression for Growth’s training solutions are designed to operate at a deep psychological level; challenging beliefs, changing behaviours and in turn driving business results. Our programmes were put in place to enable RBS to use a consistent process for out come and customer focused meetings, how to genuinely and quickly connect with customers and communicate effectively with different personality ‘styles’.

Expression for Growth created a customised solution for RBS –Customer Centricity- which incorporated various interventions over a 8-9 month period:

The core workshops which sat at the heart of this learning journey were:

The Customer Development programme set out a new, structured approach that would
enable the team to pro-actively create plans to develop their accounts. The programme
integrated information sources and processes used by the bank to help uncover future
opportunities and set goals. Delegates worked on real-life business cases to ground the
learning in reality and deliver immediate value to their ‘day job’.

The Precision Selling programme was designed to make a radical change in how the bank
dealt with customers. It focused on changing how the team prepared for meetings, giving
them the tools to deeply understand their customers, quickly build fantastic rapport and
deliver proposals that answered the customer’s needs, in a way that was truly compelling