It is an anonymous meeting room deep inside Hong Kong’s HSBC Building, and Rosanna Hon is explaining why she sometimes stands out from the faceless banking drones that inhabit Norman Foster’s storied structure.
Hon, of course, is the veteran marketer who spent seven years with Nike before raising more than a few eyebrows to join ‘the world’s local bank’ in 2006. While she admits that the shift in culture from the freewheeling sports brand to the more conservative environment at HSBC was “very big”, she remains adamant that her years at Nike offer her the right kind of background for her current role.
“I guess I needed business suits in my wardrobe,” she quips.
“Obviously, the bank is much more prim and proper but I refuse to be institutionalised. A lot of the ‘Just Do It’ spirit still resides in me.”
Given the scale of her new position this is just as well. After overseeing HSBC’s regional brand development, Hon has been handed a newly-created role in charge of customer experience for HSBC Hong Kong. Despite the ominously nebulous job title, Hon is refreshingly candid about the challenges she will face. It is a role that appears likely to call for total honesty in the face of the millions of consumers who often view banks as little more than a necessary evil.
“It’s a recognition that we need to focus and do something about customer experience. The challenge to me is, can you turn the brand values into something more concrete and tangible?”
Hon thinks that banks have a done a poor job of forming strong emotional connections with consumers, which will surprise few readers who have visited their local branch recently.
“Its probably the most unexciting place you walk into,” she admits. “It’s not stimulating and you don’t want to be in there longer than you have to.” The contrast with, say, Niketown could not be greater. “We need to be a lot more personalised. I must admit sometimes you can feel nervous in a bank. We need to really think about how the customer wants to talk on their terms.”
Hon’s 90-strong department evolved from a QSM unit that previously sat under sales, and will apply to all Personal Financial Services customer touchpoints, from retail design to products to marketing. Like any new initiative, it is likely to face some critical internal and external hurdles. “The biggest challenge is trying to tell people that customer experience is not customer service. The other is external - ensuring that we also stay close to the customer.”
For Hon, this means using customer complaints as the barometer for opinion about the bank’s performance. “We must admit that the company has grown to such a size that it’s possible we overlook loopholes here and there.And we have a lot to learn from other industries.”
Hon is hoping that a stronger research investment, combined with more aggressive pilot testing of programmes, will help yield better consumer insights. She also believes that her Nike experience, which included marketing, product, planning and advertising, will come in handy when it comes to bridging the critical gap between what the brand stands for, and how it is experienced in reality.
“It’s less about marketing, because you have to come up with models where you are adding customer value and not costing the company investment in the wrong stream,” she notes. “You need to talk to different functions about the whole business. Typically, people don’t think advertising people know how to talk to product people.”
One place it seems unlikely that Hon will be approaching for advice is agencies. The ex-Bates executive thinks that both creative and media networks are considerably behind the curve when it comes to customer experience, and is quite happy to lay the blame at the door of strategic planning departments that have “gone under the carpet”.
“They really can’t help the brand bridge the business function but agencies better start providing [this service].”
Hon ends the conversation with a typically candid flourish, saying consumers probably think of HSBC in terms of reliability. “It’s very factual, not emotional. I’d like it to be about opportunities. We’re still a way away from that. You need a vision, and it may happen faster than you think.”
Rosanna Hon’s CV
2007 Head of customer experience, HSBC PFS Hong Kong
2006 Head of brand development and management, HSBC PFS Asia-Pacific
2004 GM, Women’s business, Nike Japan
2002 Asia-Pacific strategic planning director, Nike, Portland, US
1999 Marketing director, Nike Hong Kong
1998 Director of client service, Bates Hong Kong
