Reimagining customer engagement & entrenchment through Message Centre 3.0 Qorus-Infosys Finacle Banking Innovation Awards 2024

In early 2022 we started thinking about how do we go about creating a product that will fundamentally shift how our customers engage with us and how we engage with them. We had been doing a pretty bad job prior to that and most if not all customer engagement activities were happening outside of our primary digital channel being our banking app and instead were being done on channels like email, SMS and call centers. Old tech. Old way of doing things. We needed something new.

The objective was simple, how do we fundamentally transform a low engagement feature that was offering limited customer functionality and almost no business value into a supercharged digital engagement and entrenchment product that can make and save money at the same time.

Business and customer problems that needed to be solved - For customers needing to reach out to us, they were frustrated by call center wait times or had to visit a branch to be receive a service that could not be done a digital channel. They also complained that we weren’t communicating with them timeously and frequently on key events or issues - For our marketing and customer communications teams the existing customer communication channels were perceived to have low engagement rates, were becoming expensive to use and needed more effective and cheaper alternatives - For our client experience teams, they need a more efficient and cost effective mechanism to ensure operational comms were delivered. They also had a R150m per annum SMS cost that need to be reduced - Lastly our eCommerce and personalisation teams needed new mechanisms to deliver highly targeted and personalised offers to customers. Product take up means sales revenue and operating income for the bank

So Message Centre 3.0 was designed and built to answer all of these problems, and all in one place where the customer could easily navigate to.

The primary sources of inspiration - We looked at our local banking competitors in the South African market for comparative solutions and experiences (FNB, Discovery, Nedbank, Absa & Capitec),none of which had anything worthy

- We looked at a number of 3rd party chat applications like Intercom and Zendesk which had really good communication capabilities and seemed very easy to integrate with.

- However, the organisation had already started a journey to migrate the call centres onto AWS Connect with SalesForce integration. AWS Connect had chat capability so our chat requirement could be solved using AWS.

- To solve for Bank-to-Customer communications via an inbox concept was not so straight forward and there were few reference implementations or technologies that we could leverage.

- Our SalesForce and AWS journey’s had only just started so we were never in a position to leverage those platforms at the time.

- In the end we decided to build the inbox ourselves through one of our Product teams.

Departments involved: Over the 18 Month journey to get to where we are today a number of teams were involved at various stages. - Digital and eCommerce platforms – Digital Engagement & Entrenchment Product team were responsible for the product and the build

- Voice Branch / Contact Centre in partnership with Accenture project team for the AWS Connect and Salesforce implementations

- Personalisation and eCommerce for targeted product recommendations

- Marketing and Customer Communications for campaign and customer communications

- Digital Client Experience for operational messaging

Main results todate Given that the product as it stands today is a culmination of 18 months of additions of features and capabilities along with experience enhancements and upgrades. We are now starting to see the real benefits in 2024

The last 2 additions to the Message Centre has been the largest contributing factors to a significantly increased level of engagement while realising the greatest of the financial outcomes. We are going to continue to add to and enhance this product so that it scales and delivers more value to our customers and the organisation. In summary these are the main metrics Message Centre has delivered

2024 Year on 2023 Year comparison (1 January to 15 June)

Message Centre - Homepage / Inbox performance figures - Average Daily Unique Visitors = 23,700 (+99,8% up on 2023 same period) - Page Views = 23,500,000 (+459% up on 2023 same period) - Unique Vistors = 3,950,000 (+112,6% up on 2023 same period) - Total Link clicks = 16,500,000 (+627,7% up on 2023 same period) - Total Number of Transactional Notifications = 247million YTD (Launched Dec 2023) - Total Cost Savings = R25,8million YTD (Realised from Transactional notifications. Expected to exceed R45million by end of the year) - Personalised Product Sales offers YTD = 1,2m (Launched Nov 2023)

Message Centre - Chat with Us performance figures - AI Chat sessions = 225,000 (+153% up on 2023 same period) - Engaged users = 128,500 (+144% up on 2023 same period) - Live Chat handovers = 149,700 (+202% up on same period)