By Dr. Justo Aboitiz-Ortiz, Vice-Chairman, UnionBank

In 2006 when UnionBank bought and merged with iBank (International Exchange Bank), many iBankers did not feel aligned with the UnionBank culture and decided to leave. Among them many branch managers who took with them important relationships that were primarily loyal not to the institution but to the person. The UnionBank Branch Relationship Managers then proceeded to organize recovery initiatives to win back these important relationships, and we were confident we would obtain a positive outcome because our products, services, and sales management techniques were far superior to those of iBank.

So, there was this one account with nine figures in deposits that we sought to win over. The Relationship Manager and the Regional Sales Director went by the book through the sales management process, identifying the customer needs and pain points, giving price incentives, offering superior alternatives to their current banker. This went on for six months to no avail.

Thoroughly rejected, the Relationship Manager threw in the towel, bought a huge box of ensaimadas, and personally delivered it to the customer with this message: “I have tried my best but it was not good enough, but I learned a lot from the experience. Please accept this token, a box of the best ensaimadas in all of Metro Manila, to show my gratitude. Hopefully, I will have the opportunity in the future to serve you.”

The next day, the customer asked to meet the Relationship Manager and turned over for deposit into UnionBank a check of nine figures. The customer said, “I do not care what you know, I wanted to know that you care.”

True story. As a consequence, we have in UnionBank the annual Ensaimada Awards to celebrate the best customer recovery achievements.

That is not all. We thought this through and tried to understand how we could engage our customers not only intellectually but also emotionally, so crucial, we learned, in any service industry especially one founded on trust. But we are a business and have been drilled with the idea that “we cannot manage what cannot be measured” and so how does one manage “caring”? We were also challenged by the teaching of William Bruce Cameron: “Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything counted, counts.”

From a business management perspective, the myopia of only considering the measurable could lead to problematic decision making with unpredicted and unpredictable outcomes simply because when we cannot measure the things that have the most meaning, we give the most meaning to the things we can measure. We need to guard against this thinking. Choluteca Bridge, superb but over nothing, to nowhere!

How did we pívot to close this gap between what can be measured and what matters?

Design Thinking, Human Sigma, and Agile were integrated into our core management systems to complement the narrative of the utility value of our products and services with empathy for individual team members and customer needs, wants, pain points.

Starting with empathy is the génesis block on which customer centricity is built and how relevant, innovative products and services are constantly updated with high frequency in feedback loops with the customer. The formal business framework to make empathy and customer-centricity “corporate” is Design Thinking, Human Sigma, Agile, topics for another time.

It all started with a box of ensaimadas.

Did you enjoy this article? Do you want to suggest a topic on leadership?

CLICK HERE to send us your comments and suggestions!