Maturity of customer data: Postbank
Lina Varbanova is Head of CRM Department at Postbank. She tells Qorus and Wavestone how they utilize data in order to enhance their customer experience?
Lina Varbanova is Head of CRM Department at Postbank. She 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?
The traditional banking market in Bulgaria is highly saturated. Postbank is the third largest retail bank in the country, out of 24 other players. We consider the usage of data as one of our key competitive advantages. In the past few years, we have invested significantly into creating a data-centric team and building adequate technological infrastructure that allows us to be flexible in terms of personalization of offers and creating various customer journeys. We focused on shortening the execution path when creating direct customer communication and significantly increasing its variety. This has led to a double increase in the success rates of sales and activation campaigns, proving that you need not only to reach the right audience, but also to convey the right message on time.
This topic has two main streams: the cultural change and the technological maturity (of the organization and in general).
Creating the right team that has both business understanding and tech knowledge is one of the biggest challenges incumbent banks face when embarking on this journey. The collisions between such a team and the traditional organizational processes and structures are many and strong management support is vital for this transformation to work out.
The tech maturity of the organization defines its willingness to adopt new technologies. This is not a onetime exercise, as the field develops constantly, bringing in new opportunities with ML/AI, RPA and blockchain being the latest hot trends. Flexibility and creating a learning culture is therefore key for the organization. One less explored topic is the feasibility of the tech itself. Not all technologies are ready to be used across any organization or market and the ability to recognize the ones that will create a strategic fit is vital for utilizing the bank’s resources in the right way. If we take NLP as an example, its development in English is far more advanced than any other language, and bringing an NLP tool to market in Bulgarian requires additional investment and much more development time.
What types of data are your personalization use cases based on? How do you enrich them?
As a bank, we are mainly relying on first party data and deduction methods to build our behavior groups. We have close to a hundred combinations of segments that define our customer groups and we are using them heavily to personalize messages and to identify meaningful events in the customer journey.
Enrichment of the data gathered or the segmentations is part of our growth strategy, and follows the business priorities and needs. There are two main focus points:
• Identifying new events and/or touch points between the customer and the bank (in any channel)
• Identifying new clusters of interest among existing customers.
What we have learned along the way is that data flows and analytics should be an inseparable part of any development strategy and should be developed alongside all new products, processes or offerings, if you want to be fast and successful.
Which data use cases are you particularly proud of? On which customer/employee situation? What are the expected/measured ROI elements?
We are generally very proud of the whole development we have achieved in the last two years, with our redesign of customer onboarding journeys fostered by significant technological investment. We managed to create tailored onboarding journeys (focused on cards and consumer loan products) that increased card pick-up rates by 30%, card engagement levels by 25% (measured by first transaction after activation and number of transactions in the first one, three and six months) and increase the cross-sell levels for consumer loans, adding up additional offers in the early maturity days.
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?
Personalization is not an end goal that you can bravely say you have achieved. It is a journey that we have started a long time ago and we are growing and developing as we speak.
Since our organization recognizes the constant need of upgrades and updates in this field, we may say that this is a sign of maturity, for only players that see the importance of the field may count as ahead of the game.
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