Turning employees into brand advocates at Westpac
One of Australia's "big four" banks, Westpac initiated its employee advocacy journey after finding that whilst staff were strong promoters of the company as an employer, they were not as comfortable promoting it as a financial services provider to family and friends. Kate Holloway explains how it has created an entire workforce of "part-time marketers" that have had a measurable impact on the bank's bottom line.
Too often businesses get caught up in thinking of employees as enablers, rather than customers, of their products and services. But I believe it's important to treat them as valuable customers and give them the same experience you're delivering to external customers.
At Westpac, we have a total workforce of almost 40,000 people across our various business units. If we can give them all a positive experience of the bank and get them to recommend our brand to their family and friends, it's a very powerful proposition. There are plenty of opportunities for our employees to communicate with people and connect with them at Westpac. We have a frontline of 15,000 employees, but we can effectively double that if we have everybody confidently talking about our brand and taking on the role of part-time marketers.
As part of our annual Staff Perspective Survey, we asked: "How likely are you to recommend Westpac brands to your family and friends?" The results were alarming.
Recognizing a need for change
Our employee advocacy journey began in 2008 when we measured customer advocacy with the bank among our employees for the first time. As part of our annual Staff Perspective Survey, we asked: "How likely are you to recommend Westpac brands to your family and friends?"
The results were alarming. Using the Net Promoter Score (a management tool to measure the loyalty of a firm's relationships) methodology, we had a very low score. But more concerning were the responses of our employees in non-customer facing areas, which rated in the negatives - so low that they were likely to be labelled as detractors and were actually doing damage to the Westpac brand. They would have been more likely to warn people away from the business rather than promote it.
Diagnosing the key barriers to advocacy
The executives saw these results and realized that we weren't going to reach our customer goals if we didn't have all our people believing in, and taking pride in, what we do.
Members can read the full article here.
This article was originally published in Strategic Communication Management.
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