Halifax Is Becoming Lloyds, and I Did Not Expect to Feel This Much About It.
Isn't it crazy how much a good customer experience can make you feel about a brand?
Along with other Halifax customers, I recently got a message in my app telling me the Halifax brand will be changing to Lloyds. I did not expect it to land the way it did.
A first mortgage and a lot of lovely chats
I opened my first ever mortgage with Halifax, and I have been a loyal customer since. Whenever I needed anything, I genuinely always received incredible service.
I would call up and end up having lovely chats with the people in their call centre. It never really felt like a scripted conversation. It was two humans chatting away, with the person on the other end of the phone really trying to help me get to the solution I needed.
(Yes, I appreciate Halifax has been serviced by Lloyds for a long time. But as a customer, I experienced Halifax.)
I am a switcher, and this still got to me
To be clear, I am a switcher. I will move banks for pretty much any incentive on offer. So it surprised me how unsettled I felt when the message arrived.
Maybe it is because Lloyds feels like a behemoth, and Halifax feels like the comforting friend who was there with me through one of life's biggest milestones. You do not forget who helped you buy your first home.
I understand this is a streamlining exercise from a brand perspective, and that the service will stay the same. I look forward to associating Lloyds with that same incredible experience. But it made me think about how much experiences make us feel.
Brands carry feeling
I saw a version of this from the inside during my years at Standard Life, when our corporate brand changed. The feeling of a brand carries sentiment, memories and trust. So much of that is tied to the human experience people have when they interact with it, whether that is the customer service centre, the online journey or the person who picks up the phone.
The loyalty I felt was to how I had been treated, and the Halifax name had become shorthand for all of that. Change the name and, for a moment, the shorthand stops working.
I had a similar lesson from a very different setting on a trip to the Pyramids: the encounter shapes how you feel about the whole thing.
Optimising for the feeling in an age of AI
Which makes me wonder: how do we keep optimising for the feeling of a customer experience in a world of AI and automation?
In my experience, most of the measures used to run service operations focus on speed and cost. Very few ask whether someone came off the phone feeling like a person who cared had helped them. Yet that feeling is what kept a habitual switcher like me loyal for years.
AI and automation will rightly take a lot of friction out of banking, and I am excited about that. But if we design those journeys only for efficiency, we risk automating away the exact moments that make people feel something about a brand. The question for anyone designing service right now is which moments those are, and how to protect them.
Has anyone else felt this reflective over a brand change? Or am I just having a particularly sentimental day?
If you are designing customer journeys and want to keep the human feeling in them as you automate, book an intro call. I would love to hear what you are working on.