The encyclopedia · Strategy & Leadership · Strategic decision · 2009
DBS cut 250M wasted customer hours with a new metric
DBS invented a 'customer hour' metric for wasted customer time, ran five-day workshops to delete it, and cut 250 million hours a year.
DBS Bank (Piyush Gupta / Paul Cobban)
the move
Before its transformation, DBS Bank carried an unflattering nickname among Singaporean customers who'd grown used to its acronym standing for "Damn Bloody Slow" rather than Development Bank of Singapore — long queues, slow processes, and bureaucratic friction were simply how the bank operated. When Piyush Gupta became CEO in 2009, the bank's internal metrics, like most banks', tracked cost, throughput, and efficiency from the bank's own operational point of view. None of those measures captured the thing customers actually experienced: how long they personally spent waiting on hold, waiting fo
Transformation lead Paul Cobban's team spent months narrowing down what "good service" should mean at DBS, settling on "Respectful, Easy to deal with, and Dependable" — RED — as the bank's service ethos. Living up to that standard meant first being able to measure, concretely, where the bank was failing it.
why it works
- Internal metrics tracked the bank's own cost and speed, not the customer's experience.
- The 'customer hour' cut across departmental boundaries, exposing waste hidden from any single dashboard.
- Five-day cross-functional workshops had the authority to change processes on the spot, turning the metric into action.
- Measuring from the customer's side surfaced far more waste than the bank's own metrics ever had.
what transfers
When internal metrics miss a known customer problem, invent a metric denominated in the customer's time or effort; it reveals waste invisible to operational dashboards.
what came after
DBS eliminated about 250 million customer hours of waste a year, 25x its original 10-million-hour target. DBS's customer-hour-driven transformation became one of the most widely studied banking turnarounds globally, cited by Harvard Business Review as one of the decade's top ten strategic transformations, and DBS was repeatedly named the world's best digital bank by Euromoney and Global Finance in the years following.
references
- How DBS Bank Became The Best Digital Bank In The World By Becoming Invisible
- Business Chief Asia: DBS's group strategy head talks transformation and the future of finance
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