In the prevailing competitive banking landscape, the most powerful differentiator is no longer the size of a bank’s branch network, the novelty of its digital platforms, or even the sophistication of its balance sheet.
It is the quality of customer experience, and it involves the consistency, empathy, and reliability with which a bank interacts with customers across all its touchpoints.
Interestingly, though the competitiveness in Ghana’s financial services sector has never been higher, customer experience has been misunderstood. Many banks still perceive it as the work of front-office teams such as relationship managers, tellers, sales officers, and complaints handlers. The quest to achieve competitiveness requires banks to adopt an all-encompassing customer-centric approach; an approach that orients every employee, from risk analysts and IT developers to back-office operations staff, to position themselves as an essential touchpoint.
All employees need the orientation that each decision, delay, error, or innovation influences how customers perceive value.
Indeed, for Ghanaian banks aiming to grow profitability in a tightening macroeconomic environment, empowering all staff as customer-experience ambassadors is not optional; it is an economic necessity.
Why every staff member needs to be a customer-experience ambassador
Banks are service-driven institutions whose products are largely commoditised, but what customers truly evaluate is the experience, which manifests in the form of speed, clarity, empathy, problem-solving, and trust. Notably, even staff who never speak to customers wield immense power over this experience.
For example, risk and credit teams determine turnaround times for loan approvals, while compliance officers design processes that can either simplify or complicate customer onboarding.
Similarly, IT, Digital Tools, and E-Banking staff, who are the backbone of modern banking, may never directly engage customers, but their work is crucial in ensuring uptime, digital reliability, and security.
The economics behind training all staff as customer experience touchpoints
From an economist’s standpoint, the case is clear that banks that empower staff across all departments to deliver a seamless, customer-centric experience unlock multiple revenue levers simultaneously.
For example, multiple studies, including those conducted by McKinsey in 2018 and 2023, show that empowering staff to deliver a customer-centric experience drives higher Customer Lifetime Value (CLV). Moreover, customer-experience leaders not only retain customers but also drive deeper relationships, which in turn generate significantly greater lifetime profitability.
Another economic benefit is the reduced cost of poor service. Experience-led transformations can deliver a 20–50% decline in service costs by removing friction and streamlining customer journeys and avoiding expensive mistakes, complexity, and rework.
Likewise, experience-led transformations increase cross-selling through institutional trust. A service-oriented culture built across the organisation fosters trust, and trust drives cross-sell. When customers consistently receive thoughtful, empathetic interactions, they are more open to suggestions for complementary products.
Also, experience-led transformations improve employee welfare. A better customer experience drives profitability, enabling banks to reward staff more generously through incentives, career development, and job satisfaction.
How Ghanaian banks can build the experience-led transformation culture
First, bank management can institutionalise customer experience literacy across all staff. Every employee, not just customer-facing ones, should be trained on the bank’s value promise, brand behaviours, and service standards. Embedding this in onboarding, periodic training, and micro-learning helps build a shared commitment.
Secondly, it would be helpful if banks integrated non-client-facing teams into customer experience metrics. Given that what gets measured gets improved, Risk, IT, Operations, and Compliance departments, for example, must have customer-impact KPIs to measure processing times, system reliability, error rates, and internal service satisfaction.
Thirdly, banks must consider building cross-functional service squads. For effective results, banks should set up cross-departmental teams to tackle customer journey redesign and rapid problem resolution. Such measures break down silos, enable staff to understand how their work affects customers, and speed up innovation.
Fourth, banks need to invest in establishing a culture of internal customer service. There is a for success-driven banks to orient and train all employees to treat their colleagues as customers, as high internal service quality paves the way for high external service quality. Success-driven banks equally need to invest in using integrated dashboards, automated workflows, and collaboration platforms to reduce friction and enhance visibility across departments.
In conclusion, for the industry, success will go to banks that align people, processes, and technology around a unified vision of customer value. That is the future of banking, and it begins today.
The author Oscar Onai is an Economist and PMR, National Investment Bank, Ghana - email; oscar.onai@nib.com.gh
