KIA ONLINE COMMUNITY MEMBER SPOTLIGHT

Shannon Burch
Vice President Experience

In our latest KIA Spotlight, we sit down with Shannon Burch, Vice President of Experience at Neo Financial, to discuss her approach to customer experience at one of Canada’s fastest-growing challenger banks. Shannon shares insights into how Neo Financial leverages innovation and customer-centricity to disrupt a 200-year-old banking oligopoly. She discusses the importance of testing and learning with new technologies and how real-time access to knowledge drives efficiency and eliminates the need for traditional training models. Additionally, Shannon highlights the role of collaboration in resolving complex customer issues, emphasizing that at Neo, every team member contributes to creating a seamless, memorable experience. Get ready to explore how Shannon’s strategic leadership is shaping the future of customer experience.

Execs In The Know (EITK): What drew you to a career in customer experience, and what excites you most about your role as VP of Experience at Neo Financial?

Shannon Burch:  At the heart of every business is its customers. I find it genuinely fascinating to understand how they engage with brands, make purchasing decisions, and ultimately influence the business’s bottom line. I might get more excited than most about understanding customers — not just because I believe they deserve an efficient experience to foster loyalty, but because loyal customers are essential for building a successful and profitable business.

When the opportunity to join Neo Financial came along, I didn’t hesitate to say yes. Over the past three years, I’ve brought more than 20 years of experience in leading large operational and sales businesses to Neo, where we’ve created a financial experience that previously didn’t exist.

Customer experience doesn’t begin and end with human interaction; it encompasses every touch point a customer has with your brand. At Neo, customer experience isn’t confined to my team alone — it’s a collaborative effort with growth, product, engineering, marketing, and experience teams to add value throughout the entire customer journey. This holistic approach not only creates amazing digital and personal experiences but also drives significant revenue. There’s nothing more fulfilling than working with like-minded individuals to achieve something we can all be proud of.

Having built a successful career across various businesses and functions in some of the world’s largest banks, leading the Neo Experience has been the most rewarding work I’ve done. I’m proud of how Neo’s customer experience has evolved. While we still have a long road ahead, our customers consistently express their appreciation, as reflected in our impressive Google Review rating of 4.8 stars.

EITK: Neo Financial is a Canadian challenger bank making waves in the financial industry. How do you ensure the brand stands out when creating a seamless and memorable customer experience?

Shannon: At Neo, we are transforming the banking experience in Canada, a challenge given the longstanding dominance of an oligopoly controlling 95 percent of financial assets and offering consumers limited choices with high costs. We won’t achieve the transformation overnight, which is why our brand and experience consistently evolve as we learn the experience Canadians value the most.

Skilled leadership and anticipation have been key in my ability to build a robust experience for Neo. With decades of experience leading customer-centric growth organizations, I’ve developed a keen ability to foresee outcomes. As Neo matures, our customer experience increasingly hinges on the world-class products our teams are building. However, when customers look to build trust or seek clarity, our customer experience team is well-equipped to engage in those conversations — marking a significant evolution from where we were just a few years ago. Anticipating where our customer experience needs to be six months down the line has been crucial, especially given the unpredictable nature of building a company.

In summary, I see delivering a brand as integral to our operational framework. This integration allows us to evolve our brand in tandem with our experience delivery, minimizing disruptions and costs while maximizing value for our customers.

EITK: Innovation and customer-centricity often go hand in hand. How do you balance the two at Neo, especially in a fast-evolving fintech landscape?

Shannon: Throughout my career, I have built businesses that have always included creativity and innovation to ensure success. That experience has followed me to Neo, where our culture thrives on moving quickly. We can make quick decisions by using a test-and-learn environment. We would rather fail than fail to innovate and slow the growth of the business.

In designing the operating framework we use at Neo, I anchored it in a strong knowledge management process and technology. Real-time access to information empowers people to have the correct answer at their fingertips, which ignites high productivity.  It also eliminates the need for lengthy training programs, daily team huddles, in-person training sessions, and extended hold times — costs that typically increase over time and make service delivery unmanageable.

By establishing technology as the foundation, we can regularly adapt human capital design and processes to meet both customer and business needs. This approach allows us to continuously embrace innovation and engrain it into our culture.

EITK: What are some of the most rewarding customer stories you’ve encountered since joining the organization? How do these moments shape your approach to CX?

Shannon: The stories from our customers are what truly motivates me and drives us forward, especially as we tackle the tough challenges of disrupting a nearly 200-year-old oligopoly with our startup. Some of my favorite stories are not just about how appreciative our customers were, but how these issues were resolved by a team effort, with everyone coming together to ensure the customer was well taken care of. Many companies claim collaboration, but at Neo, our customer stories remind us just how powerful great ideas and the execution of product, technology and processes can bring these experiences to life.

One story that really stands out to me is about a single parent who felt overwhelmed with managing her personal finances. As we know, the movement of money in Canada and the USA can be anything but customer-friendly, often bogged down by outdated technology and processes that create barriers to accessing funds. Our tech team at Neo managed to navigate these tech barriers, not only releasing the funds but also developing a long-term solution to ensure this issue wouldn’t plague her or others in the future. She described this experience as something completely new and positive, and she has since become a full-service Neo customer, frequently using our Tell a Friend referral program to share her experience across Canada. I love this story because it shows how deeply the Neo team cares about helping customers and the lengths they’ll go in order to improve their lives.

Another favorite of mine involves a customer whose wallet was stolen. He did everything right — freezing his cards in the Neo app, checking his credit bureau and filing a police report — yet woke up to multiple credit alerts indicating identity theft. Though the Neo team wasn’t yet online early that Saturday morning, the customer reached out via our complaints escalation email, which I check each morning.

I responded immediately, assuring him everything would be okay. After alerting Neo’s Fraud, CX Manager, and Product team, they all collaborated swiftly to stop the crime in progress, gather information for authorities, and ultimately help apprehend the offender. Nobody hesitated or balked at the early hour; everyone pitched in, and within an hour, the customer was amazed at the speed with which we resolved his issue.

I believe that Neo has so many outstanding customer stories because we are all committed to transforming the banking experience for Canadians. This means that everyone, not just those who directly interact with customers, plays a crucial role in making that transformation happen.

EITK: From predictive analytics to chatbots, AI has endless potential in fintech. Can you share how Neo is integrating AI into its services and what impact it has had so far?

Shannon: As I look into the future, I truly believe that technology enhancements will become even more integral to our daily lives and work routines than ever before. By nature, Neo accepts more risk than more established organizations; however, doesn’t want to take reckless leaps or be paralyzed by indecision when it comes to implementing new innovations. That’s why we agreed on a test-and-learn approach to AI, which aligns well with our company’s culture. This approach has already led to incredible improvements in both the employee and customer experience, as well as enhancing our business’s bottom line.

When we developed the roadmap for AI implementation, our priority was to manage risks while maximizing gains. We took a systematic approach to deploying applications in a way that ensured each step was well thought out and beneficial.

For example, our automated email responses have significantly reduced email volume, cutting it by 50 percent in the first year and eventually phasing out this channel entirely. Our scripted chatbot achieved over a 50 percent containment rate, which allowed us to eliminate the email-to-chat channel and improve first contact resolution by 100 percent, thanks to authenticated and logged-in customer interactions.

Additionally, by implementing auto-generated call and chat summaries into our CRM, we have improved the employee experience and increased consistency, resulting in a 15 percent cost reduction and a 20 percent boost in employee satisfaction. Upgrading to a GenAI chatbot has been another successful move, as we’ve consistently seen in-bot resolutions exceed 50 percent week after week, providing customers with timely resolutions as they manage their banking needs.

Looking ahead, I am excited about Neo’s ongoing commitment to improving both employee and customer experiences through the innovative use of AI. The future holds tremendous potential for continued enhancement in these areas.

EITK: Neo is known for breaking away from traditional banking models and offering digital-first financial products. How does your team innovate to meet the ever-changing expectations of modern customers?

Shannon: I joined Neo to make a difference for Canadians and have a front-row seat to an innovative hyper-growth company, making it work. Nothing is ever off the table; it may be in the backlog, but any idea is a viable one.  At Neo, our team excels at testing numerous product ideas and exploring various distribution markets concurrently. This ability is embedded in our culture because we genuinely believe we can solve the banking challenges in Canada. With that conviction, we have the risk tolerance to advance multiple initiatives simultaneously.

This mindset drives how we develop our products, marketing strategies, technology, and human interactions. Essentially, we’re always innovating with the goal of creating experiences our customers haven’t encountered before.

Of course, not every idea works; sometimes, we don’t meet customer expectations. When that happens, we pivot quickly, without regret, recognizing that letting go of an idea is just as important as creating a new one.

Having many initiatives happening at once can make it challenging to keep customer-facing employees informed, as the timeline between finalizing and deploying a product can be short. If change management or knowledge sharing is inefficient, it can increase the costs of serving customers. Therefore, when I design an operating framework, I focus on providing easy self-service access to communication, knowledge, and learning. This is achieved through an effective knowledge management platform and communication tool. Training employees to locate information is far more effective than trying to teach them everything they might not recall when needed. Integrating the knowledge management system into CRM and AI tools ensures that information is always readily accessible.

Ultimately, if our goal is to support Neo customers in a way they haven’t experienced before, knowledgeable Neo specialists are the key. Utilizing technology to support our team is how we achieve this.

EITK: Can you share a project or initiative you’ve led at Neo that has significantly enhanced the customer experience? What were some key takeaways?

Shannon: I am proud to share that one of the most significant initiatives I’ve undertaken at Neo is developing the operational framework that has transformed our customer and employee experience. This framework not only enhances the operational side of the business and supports the CX team but also lays a foundation for providing invaluable feedback to our product and tech teams. Neo thrives on constant improvement, valuing direct feedback from customers as a crucial element for growth.

The success of this initiative stems from my commitment to building it systematically, aligning with the organization’s growth at each stage. It might have been tempting to import a comprehensive framework from a previous organization, but I recognized that it would have been premature for Neo. My corporate experience has equipped me with insights to combine the best elements of diverse frameworks, seamlessly integrating them into the Neo operating model. This model was crafted to scale nimbly, focusing on process trust and gradual enhancement as the company evolves.

I often joke that the “Neo Experience” emerged from Google Sheets as our workforce management tool, evolving into the sophisticated GenAI bots and intricate tech solutions we have today.

It’s amusing to reflect on how far we’ve come, and I’m certain that three years from now, we’ll laugh at our current state, acknowledging there’s always room for improvement. I’m confident that the foundation I’ve built will endure because it is flexible, cost-effective, revenue-generating, and consistently delivers outstanding outcomes for our customers.

EITK: You’ve been a champion of
customer-first throughout your career.
What’s one lesson you’ve learned that you believe all customer experience leaders should embrace?

Shannon: As I reflect on my journey leading customer-facing businesses, it strikes me as humorous that the most vital lesson I’ve learned — and believe other leaders should adopt — isn’t groundbreaking or innovative. Instead, it’s simply about people. Building a network of customer advocates throughout the organization is crucial. For a long time, I underestimated this aspect and didn’t fully grasp the power it holds in driving a business forward collectively.

Customer behavior can be unpredictable, resulting in customer journey data that isn’t always crystal clear. This makes it easy to underestimate the impact of the experience on the bottom line. The days when customer experience was limited to moments of human interaction are long gone. Nowadays, customer experience includes every touch point with the brand; therefore, not only the CX leaders have to be customer-focused, but all leaders need to be advocates.

That’s why having a team of customer-first leaders across the organization is vital. They advocate for customer centricity and represent all the interaction points a customer has with the brand. This approach not only simplifies the process of enhancing customer experience outcomes but also helps cultivate profitable, loyal customers.

EITK: What does customer experience mean to you personally, and how do you see it evolving in the next few years at Neo Financial?

Shannon: What does customer experience mean to me? It’s about the entire journey — from the first moment a customer interacts with Neo’s app or website to how our products make them feel to marketing and human interactions.  People have a deep emotional connection to their money because it’s integral to their lives. Engaging in financial activities can trigger varied emotions, so Neo’s brand prioritizes ease and simplicity. We aim for an experience free of friction because minimizing complications enhances trust and emotional connection, making Neo’s interaction seamless.

Every day, my colleagues and I at Neo are committed to refining products and processes to reduce the need for human intervention. This approach might sound peculiar coming from someone who oversees the contact center, but it actually aligns perfectly with a modern view of customer experience. Today, customer experience encompasses far more than direct human interaction — it’s about the entire journey. Neo differentiates its customer experience by focusing on effortless interactions that evoke feelings of excitement through well-designed products and processes.

With the advancements in AI, Neo is increasingly capable of minimizing routine interactions. While some might see this as a threat to the role of customer experience agents, I see it differently. The role of contact center agents is evolving to focus on complex interactions where customers need advice, financial education, or reassurance during challenging financial decisions. The Neo Experience team is pioneering the next-generation CX agent role — one that is crucial, highly valued, and well-compensated.

EITK: Finally, can you share how your involvement in Execs In The Know and the KIA Online community has created value for yourself and your organization?

Shannon: There are numerous ways that the Execs In The Know and KIA Online Community have brought value to both Neo and me, but I’ll focus on three key aspects.

First, the access to like-minded individuals has been invaluable. When I’m in an environment with people who share similar goals and challenges, my creativity thrives. It’s easier to solve problems and adapt successful strategies from other organizations to enhance the Neo experience.

Second, the community provides a space for reflection. It allows me to step back from daily tasks and truly consider what’s happening at work. Whether through interactions with community members or utilizing KIA’s online tools, I can reevaluate situations, gaining fresh perspectives and new ideas. This environment inspires innovation and reassures me that my efforts are valuable and impactful for both employees and customers.

Finally, participating in the community gives me the chance to give back. Sharing my experiences and processes helps others be creative, solve problems, or advance their careers. I’ve been fortunate to have a dynamic and successful career across various industries and roles, and I believe sharing this breadth of experience is important. While not everything I share may resonate with everyone, if I can help another leader gain momentum, improve customer service, or enhance employee engagement, my time is well spent.

Consumers deserve to engage with customer-centric companies that value loyalty, and communities like Execs In the Know promote this mindset. Sharing this approach with leaders can help grow their companies’ customer-centric culture, making the world a better place for consumers. I am eager to be part of a community with the power to transform customer experience globally, benefiting employees and customers and positively impacting organizations’ bottom lines.