Institute for International Research

Thursday, March 27th, 2008 | 4:05PM-4:50PM

Living the WaMu Brand

Christine Frishholz, VP, Service Strategy & Alignment, WASHINGTON MUTUAL

WaMu’s history and brand are focused on providing excellent service. Maintaining that focus in the face of rapid growth, both organically and through multiple acquisitions, presents an ongoing challenge to WaMu’s strong culture. Living the brand means managing both the internal and external customer experience for consistent, distinctive and profitable outcomes. This presentation will share WaMu’s quest to operationalize the brand through governance, management practices, communications, and measures, and how this quest transcends business lines, functions and roles toward a universal goal: service leadership.

Learning Objectives:

• The litmus test: The customer experience impacts perception of brand integrity; service creates the customer experience
  
• Connecting the dots: Executional alignment between people, processes, systems and resources creates a consistent customer experience
  
• What’s measured, gets done: Increasing positive business results through service starts with defining and measuring the desired customer outcomes, and setting clear employee behavioral expectations to drive them
  
• No double standards: Aligning internal service delivery expectations of back office functions with the expectations of frontline service providers can be accomplished through a common set of universally applicable service standards