In this episode, I'm meeting Claus Nielsen from CX Facts. CX Facts is a platform that provides customer perception data to banks and large corporates.
Claus explains that while transactional data is readily available, there is a lack of customer perception data, which is crucial for understanding how customers view the bank's products and services.
CX Facts aims to bridge this gap by offering a SaaS tool that allows banks to collect feedback from customers in real-time and analyze the data through a dashboard.
This helps banks and corporates optimize their banking relationships and improve customer satisfaction.
Takeaways
- CX Facts provides a SaaS tool that allows banks and large corporates to collect customer perception data in real-time.
- Transactional data is readily available, but there is a lack of customer perception data, which is crucial for understanding how customers view the bank's products and services.
- The platform allows banks to ask as many customers as they wish, as often as they wish, and provides a dashboard for analyzing the data.
- CX Facts helps banks and corporates optimize their banking relationships and improve customer satisfaction.
- Improving Banking Relationships with CX Facts
- Bridging the Gap: CX Facts and Customer Perception Data
- "We had transactional data, but we didn't necessarily know what did the customers think of us."
- "We can build a solution where banks get access to a SaaS tool where they can ask as many customers as they wish, as often as they wish, do it globally, and then have a dashboard where they can, of course, dice and slice the data."
- "There's an underlying dissatisfaction, unfortunately, but they can't, of course, everyone's being polite and often over lunch or the like, but they don't have that data."
Keywords: Claus Nielsen, CX Facts, customer perception data, banking relationships, customer satisfaction, SaaS tool, real-time feedback
Chapters
[00:00:00] Hello and welcome to New Era FinTech Podcast. Today I am joined by Claus from CX Facts. Claus say hello, you're welcome. Hi everyone, very nice to be here and great to see you again.
[00:00:12] Likewise, likewise Claus. Now I am very excited to bring you Claus and CX Facts because what they do I think is incredibly important especially for the business, the corporate, the enterprise
[00:00:26] sections of banking. But before we get to that, Claus, can you give us an overview? Who are you? What's your background? Let's get into the episode. I can definitely. So I'm a former banker. I spent around 25 years in corporate banking primarily heading up different entities within
[00:00:44] transaction banking both from from Nordic banks and also in a large international bank. And then in addition I spent a bit more than a decade in financial consulting. Primarily worked with of course banks also doing corporate strategies but also with large corporates
[00:01:02] optimizing their banking relationships. Interesting. So always in this kind of bank slash large corporate sphere optimizing whatever could be optimized. Now then you came across a series of issues. I say this guy, I feel a little bit briefed on CX Facts because in our
[00:01:21] sister publication we featured Claus. I'll link that one on FinTech profile but for those that haven't seen that, Claus give us an overview. How did you get to the concept of CX Facts? Yeah so we are three bankers that have co-founded CX Facts and one of my partners
[00:01:39] in crime actually had this idea that the customer perception data was lacking and we of course experienced the same all three of us when we were in banking that we had you know transactional
[00:01:53] data was fine. We knew what the customers were doing with our bank but we didn't necessarily know what did the customers think of us. You know service wise, support wise, product wise etc.
[00:02:06] What were their perceptions? So we all agreed that this could be done in a good way not only creating value for the banks but for sure doing that because we also saw that when we
[00:02:19] were in banking that most banks either did their own surveys which took a lot of time and resources. Other banks bought and still are buying reports that are kind of you know semi anonymous maybe low volume of data and it's infrequent. It's typically a once per year
[00:02:40] exercise because it's a pricey so on that side we thought we can build a solution where banks get access to a SaaS tool where they can ask as many customers as they wish, as often as
[00:02:52] they wish, do it globally and then have a dashboard where they can of course dice and slice the data as they wish. The other part of it was that when working with large corporates on
[00:03:05] optimizing bank relationships we never saw or heard of a treasurer looking forward to another bank survey so I mean it's we also see now that the fatigue is setting in you know because
[00:03:19] you get surveys everywhere and so we thought of a new way of doing this where also the corporate side can have value when giving feedback to the banks. So we actually went out and
[00:03:30] interviewed a number of very large corporates and asked very bluntly if we were to build a solution that would work for you providing data to the banks on your perception, your experience what would we need to include? So we wanted to build a solution that can stand
[00:03:51] alone for the corporates and can stand alone for the banks and we kind of think we did that. I deeply appreciate what you've created because I've seen first hand the problems that exist between corporate and banks right but we say something say some more for those
[00:04:13] who maybe aren't you know who might be thinking that's nice that's a nice to have right. Can you give some examples of why this is such an important issue for the corporate
[00:04:24] the treasurer if you like or the corporate and for the bank? Exactly if we start with the treasury side or the corporate side and typically in a large corporate you will have a treasury department consisting of a handful of people maybe a bit more in really large
[00:04:41] corporates and they are the people talking to the banks negotiating having status meetings etc and it's very nice I've experienced it a lot of times both on the bank and the corporate side that you meet for a good lunch and agrees that everything is amazing everything is
[00:04:57] working well and let's see Cheryl again in three or six months but the same corporate treasury typically has 30, 50, 100 colleagues around the world working with the banks products and services and they don't have a platform or they didn't have a platform where they could
[00:05:18] actually collect that information on what is the perception from the people using the banks products services that not necessarily that don't necessarily have direct contact to the bank so we built that in so a treasury or a corporate can now select detailed information on
[00:05:40] the bank's performance we have created both for banks and corporates specific product areas so we have tailored this solution not to be a feedback solution but to be a feedback solution between banks and large corporates so we have really tailored it and built you know pre-populated
[00:06:00] questionnaires per product area where you can again look into data at all levels meaning that as a corporate you will have all the necessary information to have a really valuable and detailed discussion with any bank i have been in many meetings with clients
[00:06:21] where you know there's an underlying dissatisfaction unfortunately right but they they can't of course everyone's being polite and often over lunch or the like but they they they don't have that data you know so so you say oh how are you
[00:06:36] well we're not very satisfied why uh well we're just not generally why well you know actually everything's okay because they haven't got those examples or or or they haven't documented their dissatisfaction or the problems that are occurring and they forget about it is is that
[00:06:56] is that a thing that you're then capturing that on our on a regular basis so that that can be packaged and then shown to the bank exactly that that's our ambition so what we
[00:07:06] what we do and i actually this this morning i had one of our large corporates on the line because they wanted to collect information for their upcoming bank meetings with their five core
[00:07:17] banks so what we did was we sent out feedback sessions as we call questionnaires in our platform to the people within the organization working with the specific banks that they wanted to kind of prepare for bank prepare meetings with if we look into the platform and how detailed
[00:07:37] it is of course to bring value on both sides um presently we have 14 different product areas in the platform where we have created pre-populated questionnaires for each product area product area being cash management foreign exchange working capital
[00:07:54] uh trade finance guarantees etc um what we did here was uh you know we uh selected you can of course select or deselect uh approximately 30 35 questions that'll take five minutes for each respondent to uh to provide their feedback and then they have a set of data comprising of
[00:08:16] between 10 and 15 people on these specific subjects this was in cash management it could have been more areas as well if it's kind of a total status meeting um and then they have the
[00:08:30] option to uh if the bank is not on our platform because if if the bank is on the platform they will see the data real time gotcha real time i say sorry and and um if not on the
[00:08:41] platform the customer uh the corporate customer have the option to print our report and send it to the bank right right of course we wish to have uh and also uh you know for the value to be obvious for both parties if you have the real time system
[00:09:00] on both sides you will experience the most value for sure could you say a little bit about some of the problems for those we have a lot of retail followers um on the podcast those
[00:09:11] working in retail banking who may not they might be saying well yeah come on klaus really really but could you give an example of some of the almost some cases catastrophic issues that that will these treasury or these big corporates are experiencing now and again
[00:09:27] could you just get just to show how important this stuff is you can um when we create a questionnaire and when a corporate indeed responds to a questionnaire they have a performance score of the bank then they have a score of how important it is for me
[00:09:48] as a corporate customer so what we see is there's a there's there's a kind of a gap between the score and the importance on specific issues so if we look at the largest gaps it's
[00:10:02] typically related to well price is not an it's always going to be an issue okay right yeah yes that's always going to be the case right but matters related to kyc that is where you see some of the largest gaps and the primary one is actually
[00:10:22] how good are banks at coordinating the processes across geography so if a customer feels you know this country we need to do something totally different from this and that might be the case due to legislation or other but again how you coordinate
[00:10:40] is really important another thing where we see really really high scores and that's also not the biggest surprise um but that's on customer support so how easy it is is it to access
[00:10:54] um we saw actually a bank asking a lot of customers do you know your primary support content and that was not the case for me so um you know it's also you know every bank will
[00:11:12] optimize and optimize where possible typically but it just shows that also at least in some areas the personal touch is is so important especially when the fees are so large right
[00:11:24] lose one of these customers uh you know that can be have a material effect on your uh your profitability right yeah for sure for sure i mean we we've seen a study where where if you
[00:11:37] can if you can improve the customer experience i.e. the customer satisfaction with one percentage point you will see 4.9 percent on the bottom wow wow on that customer as an average okay that's an interesting one that is amazing numbers ridiculously cool wow yes okay so how then
[00:12:00] in in corporates then and then let's come to banks in corporates who do you approach uh i presume treasury individually who are you approaching to say look have you thought about this you know from a business standpoint that is treasury if they're large trade finance
[00:12:16] departments cash management departments um and it depends on you know we have some corporates using us on the cash management side alone and other corporates using uh you know 10 12 product areas in our in our platform where they collect data for their banks
[00:12:36] um and we also have companies uh i mean we have kind of to to uh to to a level where you can say there's there's a lot of companies uh that will that see the value and then we have up to the
[00:12:50] you know some of the top five companies in europe using our platform so it's really a large variety of corporate so it depends on of course how many banks you use how many different bank services how geographically uh spread out your organization is or your uh just your
[00:13:07] your market presence or your sales and how many banks you use etc so so is that typically the treasurer or the the teams that are using banking services the most or have it have
[00:13:19] opinions on them right yeah have issues with them that's what you're targeting and we see i mean i've talked to so many treasurers throughout time when i was in financial consulting primarily um you know preparing for bank meetings saying i have a meeting tomorrow
[00:13:32] but i simply don't have the time to to prepare i don't have any time to to collect uh data or background info so it's going to be my own feelings that we're going to talk about yeah and and when you have the overall responsibility maybe you're not necessarily
[00:13:48] that hands-on uh we have one specific corporate where where we can see that uh you know the singular largest uh challenge that they have is uh payments that are being blocked and they
[00:14:00] don't get any information from the bank so and then they can't release their merchandise etc so it's a snowball effect right and and all those things now get actually visible and transparent using our platform and that's the that's the whole work you could say that the main thing
[00:14:20] we wanted to do was create transparency because we think it'll serve both sides yes then i wanted to ask you about the banks then who is it is it the head of corporate or business banking that
[00:14:34] you would be typically working with and say hey look have you thought of this as an approach those are one of their you know relevant uh people in the banks it could be heads of
[00:14:45] geographical regions that want to look into okay how are we doing in different areas in my region could be a head of a product area you know cash management for example or trade finance
[00:14:58] that wants to know okay i'm interested in see um not only how are we doing as a whole in my area but also per country uh per industry per customer tier and and on specific customers we've built it in a way where you can say as a bank
[00:15:19] we can we can provide a setup supporting a central approach where you will ask a thousand customers in one go or and it's not either or yes it's an end at the same time you can say
[00:15:35] okay i want to use it for specific large customers where we truly want to to prepare in the right way to have specific valuable value adding discussions can i ask you
[00:15:48] then about deployment i'd like to ask you one how quickly or how easy is this you know from from zero to value and then also let me let me then ask you about business model just to
[00:16:00] highlight you know how it works um but yeah so deployment first how how quickly can you can you get running with this well basically of course it depends on the setup that the bank switches but in essence the bank can send out the first questionnaire within 30 minutes
[00:16:14] wow it's as quick as that gosh and then we can of course discuss how how much do you want to deploy in the organization which should have access which should have access to
[00:16:26] do this and this and this and we can of course uh set that up um and then there's the whole api discussion if we get to that point where do you want to have it kind of compiled with
[00:16:39] other data in your in your crm system or bi system or whatever whatnot but in general you can you know when we set up a profile you can send out the first questionnaire to a
[00:16:52] as many customers as you wish within 30 minutes gotcha and that's that's also what we uh what we wanted to make sure that that was possible because we see so many banks still buying
[00:17:04] these phone surveys etc that are you know few respondents it takes a lot of time it's a bit of a nuisance if i have to be honest for the customers yes and we wanted to kind of give them
[00:17:16] an option to to digitize everything and get more volume more valid data more more known data or data from known customers because not only can you see the customer name in our platform if you're a bank you can also as you can actually invite like 50 people
[00:17:37] from the same customer to provide feedback you can actually see their names in the platform provided that they of course agree to that right very useful okay a business model plus monthly annual how does this work well anything they want but it is a licensed model
[00:17:56] of course so so for banks we we have a license model actually matching what they if they buy external customer data today so you can license a country within a country you can license
[00:18:12] x amount of customer areas or product areas sorry and and and that's kind of the model that you can pay monthly or annually if you want annually is of course a bit cheaper but the essence is
[00:18:27] that also for us because it's digitized we can actually provide this what we perceive to be a much much better product for banks at a lower cost than than normal surveys and if they do
[00:18:40] their own survey through you know normal software we can save them so much time because we have really tailored everything to the bank yes yes gotcha gotcha now if someone is looking
[00:18:55] for you know how do you get started and they're interested in in a further conversation how do they find you clives what's the right way of engaging with you well we are of course available
[00:19:08] on on the web cx facts.com where we have our contact details we are present on you know any conference that we can we can find but otherwise give me a call on on my
[00:19:23] cell phone that you can find on cx facts.com well class thank you so much for going into so much detail and giving us an overview of of cx facts thanks for joining us thanks