Three years ago, HSBC, one of the world’s largest banking and financial services institutions, set out to design a new customer experience business model with the intention of rolling it out on a global scale to drive efficiency and innovation in the sector. Fast forward to 2025, HSBC was awarded for ‘Best CX Business Model’ at the Digital CX Awards 2025, hosted by The Digital Banker, at the Mandarin Oriental, Singapore.
One of the key reasons for the global banking giant receiving the honours was how its model was designed to be simple, intuitive and actionable. In its efforts to build the model and implement it, the bank aptly recognised the role of cultural change, with consistency being critical. Alongside that, the model also ensured the organisation was measuring the right things early on to galvanise across teams and demonstrate impact. For HSBC, experience is the product and journey design the key ingredient. This mindset ultimately led to its win.
Embedding customer centricity
In 2022, HSBC began the groundwork for creating a global customer experience programme, forming a methodology that was to be used globally, was scalable, intuitive, clear and actionable. The main idea was to have a consistent approach that would be followed and rolled out across all the markets HSBC operates in.
This global methodology is HSBC’s CX Model, which is built on three key pillars – Culture, Measurement and End-to-End Customer Journey.
The model
The culture aspect involves employee engagement – creating a bespoke curriculum and a scalable training programme for contact centre and branch colleagues across the globe. It also emphasises on bringing senior executives closer to front lines and amplifying customer voices. Additionally, celebrating employees who go above and beyond to deliver exceptional customer experiences through awards and recognition. Through these key initiatives, HSBC has successfully kick-started a long-term employee behaviour change; the evolution of a customer-centric culture where everyone plays a part in elevating the customer agenda.
Measurement is key for any initiative to be successful. Keeping that in mind, HSBC makes sure to listen deeply and consistently to what its customers and employees are saying, gathering feedback through Net Promoter Score (NPS) and robust complaints management approach. Performance is tracked across a standardised set of dashboards to ensure customer experience stays aligned with business goals and results; capturing real-time feedback across channels, and using analytics to identify patterns and pain points.
In HSBC’s CX Model end-to-end journeys is the final but critical area, because it is how customers experience their journey with the bank. Looking through this lens allows HSBC to identify what needs fixing – changing processes or building improvements – to deliver an outstanding customer experience.
Using a structured approach to become the best-in-class, HSBC identified the top journeys to focus and improve on, with the ambition to stay on top by using external benchmarking for its CX and attain competitive advantage.
The end result speaks for itself: HSBC’s CX Business Model and strategy now enables its 87,000 staff to deliver outstanding omnichannel experience to more than 40 million customers spanning multiple countries globally.
𝑩𝒆 𝒑𝒂𝒓𝒕 𝒐𝒇 𝒕𝒉𝒆 𝒘𝒐𝒓𝒍𝒅’𝒔 𝒐𝒏𝒍𝒚 𝒂𝒔𝒔𝒆𝒔𝒔𝒎𝒆𝒏𝒕 𝒑𝒓𝒐𝒈𝒓𝒂𝒎𝒎𝒆 𝒅𝒆𝒅𝒊𝒄𝒂𝒕𝒆𝒅 𝒕𝒐 𝒓𝒆𝒄𝒐𝒈𝒏𝒊𝒔𝒊𝒏𝒈 𝒆𝒙𝒄𝒆𝒍𝒍𝒆𝒏𝒄𝒆 𝒊𝒏 𝑫𝒊𝒈𝒊𝒕𝒂𝒍 𝑪𝒖𝒔𝒕𝒐𝒎𝒆𝒓 𝑬𝒙𝒑𝒆𝒓𝒊𝒆𝒏𝒄𝒆 (𝑪𝑿) 𝒂𝒄𝒓𝒐𝒔𝒔 𝒕𝒉𝒆 𝒇𝒊𝒏𝒂𝒏𝒄𝒊𝒂𝒍 𝒔𝒆𝒓𝒗𝒊𝒄𝒆𝒔 𝒍𝒂𝒏𝒅𝒔𝒄𝒂𝒑𝒆. 𝑹𝒆𝒈𝒊𝒔𝒕𝒆𝒓 𝒚𝒐𝒖𝒓 𝒊𝒏𝒕𝒆𝒓𝒆𝒔𝒕 𝒇𝒐𝒓 𝑻𝒉𝒆 𝑫𝒊𝒈𝒊𝒕𝒂𝒍 𝑪𝑿 𝑨𝒘𝒂𝒓𝒅𝒔 2026 𝒏𝒐𝒘.
