DBS cut 250M wasted customer hours with a new metric

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.