- Lessons learnt from DBS in pushing innovation to a higher level for better customer experience
- SingHealth is on the journey to empower its employees and implement similar initiatives in place
Teo Cheak Han
Assistant Director, Group Service Quality, SingHealth
In achieving its desired branding, DBS Bank has put in place a series of programmes for all levels of its staff based on RED (Respectful, Easy to deal with, and Dependable) – the bank’s customer service values. The clear communication of their values desired of every staff through training is commendable.
At SingHealth, our leaders do likewise – reinforcing our Common Purpose of “Putting patients at the heart of all we do” and SPREE (Safety, Professionalism, Respect, Experience and Efficiency) quality priorities at staff engagement sessions.
For myself, I brief new hires at their orientation programme on SPREE as part of introduction to the SingHealth culture. These, together with other reiteration efforts (such as department meetings, screen saver) have collectively attributed to the commendable scores for “Vision, Mission and Core Values” category in Employee Engagement Survey 2014 where more than 93% of staff participated.
I attended a talk by Mr Paul Cobban, DBS Bank’s Managing Director and COO of the Technology and Operations Group, at the Singapore Healthcare Management Congress two weeks ago. What resonated most with me was when he iterated the need to be prepared for winter when the season comes and illustrated how the bank integrated data with technology and created magic in their service delivery.
Through asking fundamentally-provoking questions like “What has to change?” and “What should we build?, the bank recreated the customer engagement experience through platforms like self-help kiosks and open counters concept.
He also introduced the concept of rewiring the customers’ thinking such that they can adapt to a new self-help banking environment and shared how the bank used mapping of the customer’s journey to systemically examine issues – look, understand and make improvements on key touch points.
One of the initiatives we do in SingHealth institutions to improve interaction at key touch points is by deploying service ambassadors to help our patients and their next-of-kins to use our new systems such as self-registration kiosks.
For DBS, the push towards ‘dare to try’ to ensure that innovation is delivered is akin to what SingHealth is doing – besides forming various multi-disciplinary teams to look into perennial problems and complaints, they also encourage staff to be more innovative in doing their work.
In DBS, the development of wacky ideas is facilitated in unique DBS innovation spaces such as JLab, Silicon Alley, HCD Lab and Experiment Lab. Mr Cobban also elaborated on DBS innovation initiatives such as Digital Express (a 3-4 day intensive design and development for staff to work with start-ups) and DBS Hackathons (a challenge based crowd-sourcing event for envision and preparation for the future).
Platforms like Imaginariums in the form of monthly staff engagement sessions, are alike our Synergy sessions where sharing of ideas are discussed and presented.
We can certainly learn from their innovative platforms and initiatives to explore similar partnerships with our community partners to take innovation to a higher level.
In the long term, given the right hammer, and with staff empowerment, we would be able to put the nail effortlessly through the right hole.
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