Our purpose at ING is to empower people to stay a step ahead in life and in business, and we really strive to offer one consistently superior ING experience for customers and employees.

I always like to refer to Virgin CEO, Sir Richard Branson, who says, “Clients do not come first, employees come first. If you take care of your employees, they will take care of your clients.” We all know that there is a very strong bond between EX and CX and that is why customer and employee experience are both very important to ING.

When I joined in 2018, I realized that my employee experience was not what I had expected. I’m a customer of ING, I knew about their reputation in the market, and then I found out that my candidate experience and my onboarding experience was not up to the standard that I expected. I later learned through internal research and poll surveys that others shared the same sentiment. At ING, we were seeing a drop in job engagement and organization engagement numbers.

We strongly believe that all the experiences that people have with their company (from relationships with their managers and peers to the technology they use to corporate culture) all add up. People will remember them, and they will define the level of job or company engagement that people have.

So focusing on those right moments in the employee journey will engage teams and impact productivity. Ultimately, time saved and increased engagement as a result of good experiences will add to company value, profitability, and better customer experience.

Today, the big tech companies like Google, Amazon, Spotify really raise the bar when it comes to the experiences that people expect. People are living their lives on their phones and expect very intuitive, effortless and seamless mobile experiences. We noticed and heard that people expect the same from us. So we want to ensure that wherever you are in the world connecting with ING your experience is the same.

We want to have a unified employee experience so people know exactly where they need to be if they have a question, if they are looking for content, or if they want to perform an action. Our goal is to build an employee experience platform that will serve as a hub to connect people to all the technology that they need to find information, to perform their tasks, and to get an overview of their work.

We started small. It’s been a little over a year on the job, where we have at a small scale, in an agile scale, been testing and prototyping with our teams. What we see is that if you really take that employee journey approach and really guide people through processes, take them through the most lean way through their journey then it will boost their sense of enablement and their sense of empowerment.

For instance, by better supporting our managers, we’ve seen a 30% increase in a sense of enablement and empowerment from that group, and we know that those are big, big engagement drivers.