Maturity of customer data: HSBC UK
Rob Fleming is Head of Data, Analytics and CRM at HSBC UK. He tells Qorus and Wavestone how they utilize data in order to enhance their customer experience.
Rob Fleming is Head of Data, Analytics and CRM at HSBC UK. He tells Qorus and Wavestone how they utilize data in order to enhance their customer experience.
In your opinion, how does the use of data and the personalization of offers and paths respond to development or loyalty issues for your organization? What transformation does this evolution presuppose?
Starting with the point of loyalty issues within an organization. My view would be that this is a direct link between two key factors: 1) moments of truth where the customer trust is broken, or they are frustrated with the resolution of a specific query, and 2) lack of proactive engagement in relationship building and maintenance.
The first point is critical, and requires us to be focused on rapid response and slick customer experience (which can also be personalized via the use of data insights, relevant to the specific query/journey). There will undoubtedly be some customers where a single negative experience has a lasting detrimental impact. And others where there could be a build up over time. It’s therefore important to treat each interaction as a critical moment where trust can either be gained or eroded. Whilst the outcome may not always be what the customer would like, or the decision as quick, keeping them informed throughout a process is also critical. This is again where a personalized/tailored experience can be enhanced via the use of data.
Looking at point number 2, this needs to happen from the initial customer onboarding and any subsequent sales or service journeys. Using data to understand both the customer’s needs and the specific journey they are going through, simply helps us be more relevant. We use data to inform points for proactive engagement e.g. where a customer has expressed interest in a product/service, and also to influence the type of content we display/share. Providing timely and relevant messaging helps provide a better experience and also helps the customer to navigate and/or understand options available to them. Through retrospective analytics we have demonstrated that early activation of products and services is more beneficial to the relationship growth (and therefore customer retention) than purely sales focused engagements. Trying to solve loyalty issues at the point where the customer has decided to leave is less effective to the long-term relationship retention.
In order to ensure relevant and timely interactions with customers, investment in CRM technology is critical. There needs to be real-time data flows and multi-channel connectivity, such that both customers and frontline staff are communicated with effectively. Also creating an in-depth customer feature set to provide insight into customers’ behaviors, needs and preferences is also key for personalization. We’ve invested significantly in both of these areas, leveraging external tech partners. In my view these are really key enabler areas for personalization.
What types of data are your personalization use cases based on? How do you enrich them?
Depending on the specific use case and obviously customer permissions, different data can be utilized to personalize our interactions. To give a sense of the breadth of this:
1. Cleansed and categorized transactions to show customers their spending patterns within an annual period. The enrichment in this case is more about aggregation, so that something more meaningful and personal can be shared with the customer.
2. Enriched transactions displayed within the digital platforms to assist customer understanding of a specific transaction and avoid unnecessary queries about what the transaction was for. Transactions are enriched with more specificity as to the brand, shop or website in which the transaction was made.
3. Use of digital clickstream data to understand fraud risk typologies and personalize guidance to the customer directly in the payment journey, in an attempt to prevent them making a fraudulent payment. Other messaging channels are also used to emphasize the importance of security, where we believe the customer is at risk
Which data use cases are you particularly proud of? On which customer/employee situation? What are the expected/measured ROI elements?
The use of data in HSBC is widespread and with the investments in both cloud computing and real-time messaging, we’re building a series of ‘data products’ to both help customers and empower our internal colleagues with data insights. One of the most recent developments is outlined below:
Digitization of the Financial Support journey
Developing a specific digital journey for customers in financial difficulty was critical during the pandemic. The journey simplifies the interaction model with customers, providing them the ability to share data digitally with HSBC (contextual and also actual data via open banking consent provision). Bringing this data into our internal data environments, enriching it, categorizing and validating the expenditure data vs. what we can see already, gives us a clear and full picture of the customer situation. A summarized view of this is shared with the internal Financial Support team agents, with specific prompts about areas to discuss with the customer in a follow-up conversation (where this is required). Ultimately the development of this journey and data service was less about ROI and more about providing a better experience for customers, so not just creating personalized messaging, but more a personalized experience overall. There was obviously an operational efficiency opportunity here too, by removing the need for lengthy income and expenditure conversations or for an agent to manually collect data.
More generally, what is your view of your organization's maturity with regard to the personalization of paths and offers? For example, is it ahead of the game or at the state of the art? What are the possible projects that still need to be carried out?
Overall and given the historic investments, the maturity in terms of technical capability is high. Particularly in the messaging space. We have capability to speak to customer across all channels, in real time in most cases and during specific interactions/journeys. The data capabilities to power these interactions are maturing, with our investments in Google cloud, plus partnerships with some key external SME’s/Fintechs. The perennial challenge is more one of organization and joining up the experience for the customer. There are many things that we could talk to our customers about and sometimes competing priorities internally. A key challenge that we need to address to achieve true customer centric personalization, is joining up these various opportunities into a structured, layered and sequential contact strategy. Something we are working hard to embed.
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