HDFC Bank’s digital transformation & customer experience journey amid the pandemic

We want to start with the current context. So, primarily, we start looking at reimagining the customer interactions because people are suddenly not coming into your branches thanks to social distancing and virus fear. We’re a bank, and we have a lot of physical sales capability where people came and met with you. If you want to take insurance, you want somebody to come and sit in front of you and explain. People who are used to having that physical sale need to be converted into a tele-sale or video-sale customer. Now, we get a lot of clues from your body language when speaking to you in person. On the telephone, people are not as qualified to understand how you are reacting. So I need to learn a lot of new skills because body language is not going to be a key influencer anymore. In which case voice empathy is key to looking at things like: Are you allowing the customer to speak? Are you countering the customer?

Looking at this kind of stuff, we started thinking, how can we reimagine our customer interactions? How do I embrace digital and also look at the fact that there are a lot of senior citizens? Many people are not comfortable using the mobile or the desktop to fund transfers or to take cash out. We have to help them. So how do I help people move from offline to online?

We also see that there is a lot more ‘Do it Yourself’ possible in India. We are a country where we expect service, like washing your car, driving your car and so on. Whereas “Do it Yourself” in western economies is very famous. Mainly because of this virus, in India, we have started doing a lot of things at home. That might continue after this period if people can manage it. Who knows what is going to be possible, so we need to be more digital. This digital transformation is very different from the digital we have always followed. It has to be as agile and as digital as can be. It’s not going to be one of those small micro-changes that we do. Suddenly within this one and a half months, the organization has come up with a new car loan; they have come up with instant Demat account opening, also starting our normal savings account.

Within these 45 days, we have converted many of our journeys into digital. Earlier, we were very clear that the journey for a bank account should be made in a physical branch because we never are interested in a zero balance. At the end of the day, people are going to downgrade because of income uncertainty. As a financial service provider, how are you going to have some of these products introduced? For example, we always had long term loans, but we might have to go into short term loan products for people who don’t want to borrow for a longer period. It is a very different set of people who will borrow now, and borrowing for a European holiday, for example, is almost out, even if you might have the money.

We have lots of uncertainty from these areas, but there are enough people to talk to about our products. Because they might have to tide over a three month or six-month cash crunch. Also, what we always wanted to do is to engage with our employees. They have been working in the days of lockdown – there’s a lot of people in our team who are brave souls too, going to the branches on a day to day basis, so they fundamentally kept the economy moving, whatever economy was there. The bad stuff would have happened there on the ground, so we wanted to convey a lot of attention to our people, that you can start.

So as a brand, we did two campaigns that were mind-blowingly different. Normally we would never actually put our brand logo on the ground. We called it a “Safety Grid” with our brand logo as a beautiful center spread that has four arrows. From an outside perspective, it will look like this nice rectangle or a square. We printed it and put it on the ground with a distance of one and a half meters away so that people can stand on it, and they can practice social distancing across 5000 shops, primarily pharmacies and groceries.

There were a huge hue and cry, with people saying, how can you put your brand on the ground? We told very simply – put it. We are no bigger than the society that we operate in, and society is undergoing a crisis. We are known for safety and security. If my safety and security can be taken to the ground to help society, then I will do it. When I put the brand on the ground and ask people to stand on it to practice social distancing, the entire company suddenly looks at it and says, Wow, here is the company coming and telling everybody to stand on my brand logo. I feel that the brand affinity for the employees increased dramatically wherever I have done this. Obviously, at 5000 outlets I will not be able to cover the entire audience, but the employee’s ability to perceive things is very different.

To follow up on that campaign, we also wanted to create engagement, and we wanted to create hope. People are very worried, and we want to overcome it, and we will overcome it. So we wanted to inspire people. We tied up with AR Rahman, and we came up with a music video called “Hum Haar Nahin Maanenge.” You might say that everybody has done a music video in this kind of situation. But you must understand HDFC Bank has never advertised in this way, and we have never done this kind of brand investment. We got AR Rahman and Prasoon Joshi to come and compose during the lockdown period, and hundreds of big names are all singing for us together in a song, and we spent a lot of money on that.

What happened is suddenly the entire organization looks at it and says, Wow, we are different. Suddenly the employees’ energy levels are very different – they get that energy and inspiration – that I can do a lot more and nothing is going to stop me. You have to follow that up with actions on the ground, and you need to break conventions. So when you get a message back into the system, they understand these are not empty words. My consumers understand these are not empty words. HDFC bank will break the rules, and we will be bold. We will break the mold and be ready for the new – my consumers know for a fact that never has HDFC bank done anything like this before. My consumers would see the brand logo on the ground and remember that. My consumer will say, yes, I saw that video by HDFC Bank. We had two and a half crore views on that video. People would have seen it and said, yes, there is this energy, which I’m getting. This is what is going to stand me in good stead.

From a brand perspective, and from a hardcore digital technology perspective, we have effectively used this time to get our models sharpened. We’re having a lot of discussion about whether our models will work in these kinds of situations. Ultimately, you will not know until the time the event passes by.