How Crelan runs a multi-touchpoint VoC programme through one platform
How Crelan, a Belgian cooperative bank, runs a multi-touchpoint Voice of Customer programme for its whole customer base through one central platform.
Crelan is a Belgian bank, headquartered in Brussels. The bank runs on a cooperative model, meaning that its customers can also become co-owners. Crelan serves private customers, the self-employed, SMEs and agricultural businesses across Belgium, in Dutch and French. Its roots trace back to agricultural credit founded in 1937, and the bank took its current form through the 2013 merger of Landbouwkrediet and Centea.
In June 2024, Crelan completed the integration of AXA Bank Belgium, bringing the group to 4,179 employees (agents and their staff as well as head office employees) and positioning it as the fifth-largest bank in Belgium by total assets.
Customer feedback at Crelan sits inside the Customer Excellence team, where market research and customer feedback are run as one entity. The Customer Excellence team manages the customer feedback (VoC) and centralises the reporting that goes to the commercial direction, the Go2Market teams, Product Development, sales and Marketing.
Hello Customer is a tool we intensively use to measure customer feedback. We've been working with Hello Customer since 2016.
What they needed to solve
Crelan listens to a customer base spread across two regions, two languages and four very different audiences, with a centralised customer feedback function. Three problems shape the way the work gets done.
Crelan serves private customers, self-employed professionals, SMEs and agricultural businesses across Flanders and Wallonia, in two languages. Listening well means asking the right question at the right moment, on the right channel, for each of those audiences.
Customer feedback at the bank is centralised inside Customer Excellence. The volume of channels and surveys across the bank means the platform must remove the manual work of categorizing comments, summarizing topics and producing reports at scale, so the team can spend its time on the analysis rather than the plumbing.
The reports go to the management teams, Go2Market teams, Product Development and Sales. Each audience reads them for a different reason. The signal coming out of the platform must hold up to every one of those readings.
How Crelan uses Hello Customer
Crelan runs five distinct customer feedback streams through Hello Customer.
Every month, a sample of Crelan customers receives an email NPS survey. The score is tracked over time, segmented by region and customer profile, and used as the bank-wide barometer of satisfaction.
Customer care surveys go out right after a call to the Contact Centre. The questions cover whether the customer or agent got the right answer and got it in time. The feedback is used to evaluate quality inside the department and gives the team a continuous read on what customers and agents experience on the phone.
Customers who churn or close a specific product receive a targeted survey to capture why. Each is designed to make the response useful to the product or commercial team that owns the next decision.
Crelan works with independent agents. Aside from customer feedback, agents are also regulary contacted for feedback on different topics and tools.
Reporting is centralized because the platform's depth rewards a careful read. The reports cover the evolution of scores, segmentation across customer groups and regions, the Key Driver Analysis showing where Crelan does well and where it does not, and the topic summaries pulled from open customer comments. Stakeholders across the bank can access the platform to look at the details, and the curated report is what frames the internal conversation.
Results
Actually, Crelan runs four distinct customer feedback streams through one platform. The bank has a regular monthly read on overall satisfaction, instant contact-centre quality data, and structured feedback at the two moments that matter most for retention: when a customer churns and when a customer closes a product. The Key Driver Analysis sits at the centre of the working process. In Ilse's words: very easy to comprehend, in one view you see immediately the problem topics and where you are doing well.
The reporting is what carries the work into decisions. The reports are distributed amongst the commercial direction, Go2Market, Product Development, sales and product management. Marketing., and each audience reads them for a different reason. The Key Driver Analysis frames where to focus, the topic summaries pulled from open customer comments give the color behind the scores, and the segmentation across regions and customer groups shows where the picture is consistent and where it is not.
The combination of NPS, instant feedback and Key Driver Analysis on one platform replaced a lot of manual work with an analytical view that fits on a slide. Ten years in, Hello Customer is a central customer feedback tool for a cooperative bank of 4,179 employees (agents and their staff as well as head office employees).
More from the team
The Key Driver Analysis is very easy to comprehend. In one view, you see immediately the problem topics and where you are doing well.
What we really love is the summaries. When you take a topic from the Key Driver Analysis and make a summary, that is very useful.
Hello Customer is a very handy application to quickly survey customers and quickly assess processes. Very user-friendly, with lots of possibilities.
Hello Customer comes into the picture mainly for customer and agent feedback. We question our own customers and agents across several touchpoints.
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