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Video conferencing and technology enables cultural change within Citizens Bank

Dec 13, 2019 — Jillian Zimmerman

191 years old.
1,100 branches and 2,900 ATMs across 11 states.
24^th largest bank in the United States.
400,000 collaboration meetings/year.
75 million minutes of meetings/year.
$162.7 billion in total assets.*

In numbers, this is Citizens Bank. But there is much more to their story.

Customer-centric approach

Citizens Bank is one of the nation’s oldest and largest financial institutions. Their goal? To help the people they serve reach their full potential. With a customer-centric approach, they bring a wealth of knowledge to banking, insurance, and investment services.

In 2018, Citizens Bank saw a growth opportunity for their company. One that could position them as a technologically progressive bank and allow them to compete with even larger banks in their industry.

This opportunity took the form of a digital transformation project.

New collaboration experience

Eric Johnson, Head of Workplace technology of Citizens Bank, was interviewed about the plan. The objective was to select a new, consolidated and integrated collaboration experience for everyone in the company. They wanted the technology they were using, to work together. And they wanted to enable employees to work from anywhere, on any device. Things that used to be manual, like picking up the phone to have a meeting, would now be streamlined. He explained that to do this [transformation project], “they looked at the market to see who had a world-class reputation.” After evaluating vendors, they chose Cisco and migrated the entire company onto the Cisco Collaboration experience. From mobile devices, to the contact center, to desk phones. It sparked a huge cultural shift.

The meeting experience was important for Citizens Bank. It was essential that all colleagues experienced the same thing, whether sitting at a desk, a conference room, at their house, or in their car. Johnson states, “from a cultural standpoint, we ripped the Band-Aid off.” Meaning that they hit the ground running with the Webex deployment, with readily available video conferencing software and conference rooms set up so people could begin collaborating in this new way– all integrated from end-to-end, with top-notch video and audio quality.

Every meeting at Citizens Bank is now video enabled, which has created a more flexible work style and progressed the cultural shift. In addition, Webex technology has made a huge impact on how and where employees work not only with each other, but also with their clients.

Benefits and beyond

The benefits to this project have been numerous. Teams would often have to wait to make a decision until someone came into the office so they could discuss it. But now they make decisions immediately by having a video call, or sharing a file through Webex Meetings and Webex Teams. In addition, technology adoption scores are exceeding growth predications and have improved by 25% in the past quarter alone. And on top of that, hiring at Citizens Bank is no longer limited to applicants in a certain location. They can now hire the best talent for each new opening.

Going forward, Johnson says that Citizens Bank is looking forward to an even tighter integration of the collaboration experience from the branch to the contact center, and from colleagues to customers. They are looking forward to AI capabilities which will continue to streamline meeting workflows, and enable things like automatic note-taking in meetings, which can all be done in the background.

Citizens Bank is leading the way by technologically changing how they work and how they meet.

Learn more about their story and check out their video here: