Understanding the needs of banking customers in the digital economy

Jyske Bank uses SAS Customer Intelligence 360 to personalize customer experience that in turn increases profitability and creates lasting brand loyalty.

In recent years, the behavior of banking customers has changed. They have higher demands for digital solutions, as they have become more familiar with digital journeys inspired by other industries and their private use of digital interfaces. They no longer visit the bank. So how does the bank maintain a relationship with its customers?

Many banks are puzzling this exact question. Particularly since digitization has recently taken a quantum leap as Covid has accelerated digital technology adoption by at least seven years. Customers are very digitally ready.  

Jyske Bank has addressed this challenge and launched a new IT project. A project where the bank's communication will be more targeted to the individual customer's needs.

“Relevant communication based on the customer's digital behavior is key to preserving and expanding the relationship with the banking customer,” says Tom Palving, Center of Excellence lead at Jyske Bank with focus on Digital Communications, Sales, and Loyalty.

Every customer has unique needs and expectations for individualized services. They also represent variable profitability for the bank. Jyske Bank, the third-largest financial institution in Denmark, wanted to offer relevant, timely services to foster good customer experiences as well as profitability.

Founded in 1967, Jyske Bank now has 3,218 employees and 35,2 billion DKK in equity. Working with SAS, Jyske Bank is taking a new approach to meet its customers’ needs and modernize the way it interacts with customers. The bank is using SAS Customer Intelligence 360 on Amazon Web Services to better understand its customers and optimize marketing efforts.

“We want to preserve and expand our strong relationships with our existing customers,” says Palving. “And for individuals who are not yet customers, we want to offer, through open banking, an opportunity to see how it feels to be a customer in our bank. Relationships grow from having a strong brand, strong advisory competencies, and strong digital offerings.”

One aspect of a successful relationship is frequency of interactions. Jyske Bank wants customers to visit often, not necessarily a physical bank branch, but through digital channels. The bank sought a digital solution that could provide insights on each customer’s unique needs, build more customized touchpoints, and design better user journeys.

“Advising customers requires knowledge and insight. We need to know more about our customers to provide advice that outmatches online services and Google. The ambition is to be where our customers are, including through communication, and to listen digitally to learn more about them,” says Palving.

Jyske Bank is implementing a communication platform to make the digital customer dialogue relevant, present, and proactive, in the same way as customers experienced in the local grocery store in the era before smartphones and online financing.

Many touchpoints – one workflow

With SAS Customer Intelligence 360, Jyske Bank can plan everything from traditional events to email campaigns and digital advertising in one workflow. Learning is built into the platform, so the digital sales team at Jyske Bank can better understand how different types of communication impact each customer and which channels to use. The bank can track the influence in real time and adjust the approach as needed.

Palving points out the importance of gradually implementing new ways of working and new features, which the platform’s flexible structure allows for.

“SAS Customer Intelligence 360 is an out-of-the-box solution that can support the needs of Jyske Bank for years to come,” Palving says. “We do not need to use every module to get started; we can increase our usage and add more modules as we learn.”

Palving continues, “We wanted a platform that had the capacity to evolve with us for some years ahead, and that was one the main reasons why we chose SAS.”

Personal communications at scale

Communicating more directly and frequently with customers was a priority for Jyske Bank. However, the bank wanted to ensure it could scale communications without sacrificing personalization.

“One of the things we wanted was to communicate more to our customers,” says Palving. “We needed more direct communication that was not mass broadcasted, but one-to-one. We also wanted to work with more types of communication, so not just selling a product but also giving insights to customers. Now we’re doing all of that in the SAS Customer Intelligence 360 platform and we can easily keep track of what we’ve communicated to individual customers.”

To enable personalized communication, Jyske Bank had to identify its customers' existing interests precisely. It accomplished this by employing behavioral data modeling and tracking.

“The tracking in SAS Customer Intelligence 360 is something we are very fond of here at Jyske Bank,” Palving explains. “Combining our own data with the customer behavioral data in the cloud was easy in the platform.”

With this information, Jyske Bank has been able to create personalized campaigns across customer interactions.

“We went from having a lot of broad campaigns running to having what we now call ‘always on’ trigger-based campaigns that are more personalized,” says Palving. “When a customer clicks on a webpage, or their balance falls below a certain figure, it activates a personalized communication. So far we’ve built more than 100 ‘always on’ campaigns. We are communicating much more to our customers in a relevant way.”

Cloud hosting saves resources

Running SAS Customer Intelligence 360 on Amazon Web Services represents one of the first cloud implementations at Jyske Bank. Palving has great expectations in terms of saving resources, as there will be no running updates to the platform.

The collaboration between Jyske Bank and SAS in implementing the platform has been a positive experience, he adds.

“We have seen that the SAS team has a high technical skill level, and they understand their platform very well,” Palving says. “We get great advice on what to take into use as well as how to use it. It is obvious that SAS’ many years of experience handling data really helps create an efficient project process.”

With the right software in place, and the customer's consent, the bank can pair the bank's internal customer data with customers' digital footprints, providing a better understanding of the customer's current wants and needs, which can then be translated into relevant communication for the individual customer.

One example is that the bank uses the time the customer has spent on certain subpages of Jyskebank.dk as a metric in the customer journey.

“In a recent pension campaign, we added behavioral data and targeted customers that spent more than sixty seconds on our web pages which resulted in a ROI of 9%. This is a significant improvement from previous campaigns which have had a success rate of 1.4% when targeting customers in the same segment,” says Palving. “Another example is a recent car loans campaign where we had an increase in buying rate from 7% to 13.1% using the same method of filtering behavioral data. Over time this gives us an opportunity to allocate our resources throughout our sales channels much more efficiently than we have done so before,” he continues.

The ambition is to have a more proactive and regular communication pressure towards customers, which gives Jyske Bank a better overall picture of the customer and the customer's needs. This allows the bank to optimize the customers' overall financial situation and at the same time bring the bank's relevant services into play.

“Our ambition is to build a communication tool that is so efficient that all customers experience Jyske Bank as relevant, present, and proactive. However, we are still working on the business objective,” he says.

“When we succeed, we will gain a deeper insight into our customers than the niche players will ever gain, and then we can give our customers the best financial advice that they can't get anywhere else,” concludes Palving.