Maturity of customer data: Emirates NBD

What types of data are your personalization use cases based on? How do you enrich them?

• The Enterprise Data Platform (EDP) is a large scale data management initiative budgeted for AED 94 million as part of bank's ongoing digital transformation program. The primary objective of this strategic program is to address the data integration for enterprise-wide business subject areas across all domains of the bank (Retail Banking, Wholesale Banking, all cross-functional divisions) both for Head Office in UAE as well as all the subsidiaries including Emirates Islamic Bank and five international locations (Egypt, KSA, London, Singapore and India), thus enabling seamless data consumption for advanced BI, analytics, marketing and regulatory use cases.

• The data captured from 50+ applications (both internal and external) is integrated and organized into HADOOP (data lake) and SAP HANA (data warehouse) layers of the EDP platform. The data refresh happens on a daily basis for all subject areas leveraging advanced Informatica Big Data Management (BDM) tools, Dynamic Data Ingestion (DDI) framework. Also, the real-time events are captured for specific business use cases leveraging KAFKA message broker topics. The data warehouse has been built leveraging SAP's Financial Services Data Model (FSDM), an industry reference data model for banking. Emirates NBD is the first bank globally to implement a data warehouse using SAP's data model, which has been largely co-created by SAP and Emirates NBD..

Which data use cases are you particularly proud of? On which customer/employee situation? What are the expected/measured ROI elements?

The Multiplier Effect – our next best action framework:

The Multiplier Effect is an end-to-end framework for customer personalization which solves three main problems:

1. Whom to Target? Focusing on right targeting with propensity models across all bank products.

2. What to Sell?  Identifying high revenue generating products & actions for every customer based on revenue models accounting for key financial attributes. Marrying the propensities with expected revenue to maximize profitability.

3. How to Communicate? Effective personalized communication through customer preferred channel to maximize conversions, and reduce customer fatigue from mass bombardment of communications.

Our framework is a unified approach focusing on all three attributes above – Customer Preference + Business Profitability + Effective Communication.

• Recognized by SAS and published as a whitepaper on their website 

• Awarded the Winner for the Best CX Business Model by the Digital Banker

• Awarded the Best Customer Centric Business Model by the MEA Retail Banking Innovation Awards 2021

• Awarded the Best Application of Data Analytics by the 12th Annual RBI Asia Trailblazer Awards 2021

Customer Calls & Service Score (C2S2):

Our Call Center Customer level Analytics project, C2S2 (Customer Calls & Service Score) went live in January 2022 with the Emirates NBD IVR system, to prioritize customer calls in a scientific manner.

Emirates NBD Call Center plays a pivotal role in interacting with their customers and adhering to their requirements regularly. To move away from the traditional model of just servicing calls, we adopted a data-driven approach to change the narrative to servicing customers. Actual call reasons were assessed through text mining using multiple data sources to design a customer-centric framework using a three pronged approach:

1. Link analysis to predict customer’s next call

2. Developing customer clusters with similar calling behavior

3. C2S2 scoring framework to prioritize customers on IVR based on multiple attributes like customer relationship, revenue, calling and digital behavior.

This one-of-a-kind call center analytics framework is not restricted to call level analysis for operational efficiency. It solves multiple objectives with a much larger benefit than just operations:

• Prioritize high-value customers calling for relevant reasons and transfer them to agents

• Accelerate digital adoption to migrate calls from IVR to alternative digital channels

• Shift customer perception of calling the call center for every small enquiry and redirect them to alternative digital channels providing faster information.

The C2S2 project was awarded Highly Commended Achievement as Excellence in Service Innovation by 12th Annual RBI Asia Trailblazer Awards 2021, and Winner for Excellence in Customer Service Innovation in the Digital CX Awards 2022 by the Digital Banker.

ROI elements of both use cases include incremental revenue, operational efficiency, channel optimization, effective communication, better CX and lower attrition.

What are the main obstacles and/or key success factors you are facing in their development and/or deployment?

As a customer intelligence arm for the Bank, we have constantly tried to align our objectives with the Bank’s mission. In doing so we came up with the framework of the Multiplier Effect, wherein we aim to move from a product-led view to a customer-led view and provide solutions which cater to our customers’ needs. To achieve this we had to break the silos and work across teams to create a one-stop solution on one hand while managing the cultural change related to data-driven decision making in the organization on the other hand.  

Initial implementation of the Multiplier Effect (ME) framework has yielded promising results, with 15% incremental revenue opportunity, with the performance in a few specific areas as listed below: 

• Card customers who were earlier pitched both loan on card and balance conversion are now pitched the best product based on the ME by both call center and digital campaigns, driving conversions by almost 10%. Irrelevant communications reduced by 30%. 

• Debit Card Retention Campaigns based on the ME generated 33% incremental spends.

• FX Propensity Activation Model in a targeted segment captured 60% of activations from just 30% of customers, especially during COVID-19. 

• Credit Card Spends Activation models captured 70% of activations from just 30% eligible base. 

• Liabilities Balance Build Model captures 70% of the customers increasing balances in the top 20% population.

Similarly C2S2 implementation had to face a lot of operational and IT challenges before it saw the light of day.

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?

With the booming availability of information and advancements in IT, banks today are sitting on vast amounts of data, which if amalgamated with the power of analytics can unleash a world of opportunities that vastly improves decision making. Making use of extensive data to extract relevant and practical insights is extremely crucial in a customer-oriented space.

Without any analytical framework, earlier customers were being bombarded with communications on multiple products and services as cross sell without understanding their needs and preferences. But now with our in-house analytical next best action framework called the Multiplier Effect (which is recognized by SAS and published as a whitepaper), we facilitate changing customer preferences by focusing on three main attributes of Customer Preference + Business Profitability + Effective Communication. For instance, a travel lover would receive communications like ‘Travel worry free with extra cash on your credit card and attractive interest per month’, while a parent paying education fees for his children would get communications like ‘Convert education expenses into easy installment plans’.

This framework uses all the customer data available as a bank to provide them with the most personalized offerings, therefore being the best example of usage of big data for customer strategy in the bank till now.

75% of customers are willing to pay more to shop at a business with a great customer experience, and 53% said they would leave permanently if the experience was poor. 

• For instance, our cards wizard on the website currently recommends the top three most suitable credit cards for a customer based on his needs and preferences. It is based on our in-house cards recommendation engine scoring framework, developed on user inputs on preferred benefits and features, salary, nationality and existing customer behavior.

• As another example, to address key challenges of personalizing marketing creatives at scale and test various elements of customer communication, we collaborated with Persado (digital creative / marketing communication optimization tool) in 2020. The platform has been successful in improving creative click through rates and increasing upper funnel marketing efficiencies. Persado’s AI-driven marketing language cloud platform understands human emotions that work and deliver marketing performance. Its machine learning algorithm deconstructs the original message and auto-generates up to 15 variations of the creatives along with the best predicted message. Each variant is tested on social media and the best performing marketing creative is scaled. 20 experiments across 200+ variants were launched.

There is still an opportunity to extend personalization beyond the usual banking. 48% of customers would like banks to provide advice and product information relating to what they’re currently doing, such as buying a property. Customers also want to help shape their own banking experience, and 43% would do so by conversational banking – the element of human interaction in a digital world

• Live chat – enables brands to provide customer service in real time. It not only makes support look more human, but also helps to resolve issues faster and helps track user journey and behavior. Some banks are also implementing video chat features to enhance the customer experience and make it as close as possible to face-to-face banking (building compatibility and trust is easier).  

• Cobrowsing – allows agents to view and interact with a customer’s web browser in real-time. Cobrowsing has shown customer satisfaction rates that are more than six points higher than the average, at 89.3%. ICICI used cobrowsing for its insurance application process and were able to decrease AOT by 50%, while customer satisfaction went up by 65% and the rate of closing contracts increased by 62%.

Is there anything else you would like to highlight?

Given the aggressive way in which companies are trying to personalize content and reach out to customers effectively, it is essential to ensure that all interactions with customers are meaningful and derive maximum value through effective implementation and sync between the three key pillars: 

• Understand customer DNA: It is important to know our customers, understand their banking DNA, behavior and preferences, the channels they use and prefer, transactions, credit behavior, and level of affluence, aspirations, and propensities to all the products that are serviced by the bank.

• Analytics engine: With this data in place, it is crucial to have a robust real-time analytical engine with an ‘always on feedback’ loop and recursive learning algorithms to generate real-time insights from customer data and use them for effective targeting. 

• Personalized curriculum: With the customer insights and the analytics engine in place, it is vital to have a personalized curriculum to drive customized interactions for every customer. For this, we need an integrated delivery platform – marketing automation, a customer 360 so all channels understand customers better and deliver a personal experience. 

For large organizations to personalize at scale, they have to effectively sync the three pillars listed above like in an orchestra. They should always adopt an ‘Always On’ marketing approach – this refers to a future state where the organization can deliver marketing messages to customers when it is most relevant to them across all channels as opposed to a blanket marketing approach.