Making Customer Experience Stick at the Frontline
Designing behavioural routines for relationship driven banking
ATB Financial had already made a significant investment in defining what exceptional, relationship-driven banking should feel like. Its Experience Standards gave employees a strong foundation, but three years after launch, frontline teams still found it difficult to translate those principles into consistent behaviours during busy, complex client interactions.
J5 partnered with ATB to close the gap between understanding the standards and applying them in everyday work. By combining service design with behavioural science, we designed practical routines, coaching approaches, and role-specific tools that helped employees turn abstract ideas such as empathy, curiosity, and relationship-building into actions that could be repeated, reinforced, and sustained.
INDUSTRY
Financial Services
CLIENT
ATB Financial
WHY IT MATTERS
Customer experience strategies only create value when they change what customers experience. Even well-designed standards can plateau when employees are expected to interpret broad principles within the time pressures, systems, and competing demands of frontline work.
This project shifted the focus from designing better standards to designing the conditions that help those standards endure. The work preserved ATB’s existing investment while creating a practical way to improve consistency across branches without turning human conversations into rigid scripts.
PROCESS HIGHLIGHTS
We conducted more than 20 interviews with frontline employees and completed five full days of observation across rural and urban branches to understand how the Experience Standards worked within everyday banking.
We designed eight behavioural routines, four role-specific field guides, and a coaching approach, then refined them through two rounds of scenario-based testing with employees and leaders.
Impact
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Customer Level
The routines helped employees move from checklist completion toward responding to the needs and cues of the person in front of them.
Greater focus on discovery, empathy, and meaningful conversation created a stronger foundation for relevant advice, trusted relationships, and more consistent experiences across branches.
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Employee Level
Employees gained practical guidance showing what the Experience Standards looked like within the realities of their specific roles.
The routines provided enough structure to make expectations clear while protecting employees’ ability to exercise judgment and adapt their approach to each customer.
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Organizational Level
ATB gained an implementation ready framework that extended its existing Experience Standards rather than replacing three years of internal work.
Eight validated routines, four field guides, and a future-focused coaching approach created a practical mechanism for reducing a 49 point experience quality gap between the highest and lowest-performing locations and strengthening relationship-driven banking across the organization.