Violet Lazarevic-Sittrop has taken on the role of Head of Customer Experience for the Commercial Bank at ANZ. In this position, she is responsible for the end-to-end customer experience for small and medium-sized businesses in Australia. Her role involves ensuring customer-centric strategies are integrated and aligned across the bank, optimising them to meet customer needs.
Violet has an impressive background as well as qualifications in customer experience and market research. On top of her academic background, she has worked for organisations such as Telstra, Endeavour Drinks Group and Visit Victoria. I recently interviewed Violet on her new role and how she will drive the strategy to enrich the bank’s understanding of its customers.
Mark Atterby (MA): Can you please describe your career and new job role with ANZ?
Violet Lazarevic-Sittrop (VL): I started my career in academia, I have a PhD in Marketing, and I was a lecturer and researcher at Monash University. It was there that I realised my passion for understanding customers. After working on a joint research project for with an organisation, I felt inspired to move into a commercial market research role. Market and customer research agency work was very interesting and gave me exposure to lots of different customer problems in lots of different organisations and industries.
However, I found myself feeling unfilled at the end of projects because I didn’t know if the client implemented the changes we recommended, or how it was ultimately received by either the customer or the business. This encouraged me to move into organisations to influence research, insights and customer understanding from the inside. I discovered that helping a business understand a customers’ needs and how to better deliver experiences to meet those needs really gave me joy.
My new role is to lead Customer Experience for the Commercial Bank at ANZ. In the commercial bank, we service the needs of small and medium sized businesses in Australia and aim to be the leading bank for Australians looking to start, run or grow a small-to-medium sized business. In this role, I act as the custodian of the end-to-end customer experience, helping to ensure integration and alignment and maintain and optimise customer-centric strategies.
ANZ has a strong foundation of customer listening and understanding customer needs. As part of this role, it is my responsibility to enrich this understanding by employing best practice in comprehensive voice of customer programs but also triangulating this insight with other customer data. The ultimate goal is to continue focusing on and implementing the most important ways to meet our customers current and emerging needs.
(MA): What specific aspects of your experience and background are most relevant to the challenges you will be facing?
(VL): I believe there are two key challenges in customer experience today.
The first is around integrating CX data with other data sources to provide a richer, more holistic picture of the customer and better insights into the areas of opportunity. My diligent training in qualitative (or unstructured data) and quantitative (structured) data, as well as a rigorous foundation in statistics and data modelling, helps me understand how to best bring data together to get the most actionable insights out of it.
The second is around engaging and rallying a business, often a large and complex business, around the key priorities and opportunities for delivering a better experience and meeting customer needs. Starting my career teaching complex concepts to others really prepared me for translating complexity to simple and understandable ideas. I have evolved this skill around storytelling, and I love bringing customer stories to life inside the organisation to build customer closeness and empathy.
(MA): What are your immediate priorities?
(VL): As with any new role, my immediate priority is to understand everything that exists within ANZ today to build a baseline of foundational insights and knowledge. Then, to determine where there might be opportunities to build understanding, and formulate a plan for how to build that understanding in a sustainable way that will facilitate organisational priorities and actions.
(MA): What will success look like for your new job and how do you plan to achieve it?
(VL): For me, success is defined by increasing customer acquisition and customer retention. Ultimately, customer experience success is measured through whether customers join the bank and whether they leave the bank. The plan to achieve successful customer experience is through enhanced customer understanding. Holistic understanding of current customer needs and opportunities to better meet those needs will eventuate in customer retention. Comprehensive understanding of potential customers and their needs will help identify how to best target those customers in concert with marketing teams. Customer understanding is key to this and will help us identify the key opportunities to better meet customer needs and deliver great experiences.
(MA): What impact is AI having on roles such as yours? What are the opportunities and the challenges?
(VL): Voice of customer listening programs produce a lot of unstructured data. GenAI represents a big opportunity to analyse that data faster and comprehensively to extract more insight. There are already great GenAI tools in the customer experience space and these models will only get better at thematic analysis and understanding sentiment.
AI has a lot of potential to help bring disparate data together to better understand customers and their current pain points. This requires a combination of structured and unstructured data, brought together in meaningful ways. These models, which are often quite bespoke, still require a lot of time and investment. Once these approaches become more accessible, customer understanding has the potential to skyrocket.
However, like working with any data, it is context that really leads to insight. Ensuring that AI remains relevant with the right context, data and signals that something has changed will be key. Customer needs and expectations keep evolving and so customer experience must never be a set and forget exercise. Incorporating AI and ceasing to listen to our customers will not help us get closer to true customer understanding.
