Understanding the needs of banking customers in the digital economy

Jyske Bank uses SAS Customer Intelligence 360 to personalize customers’ banking experiences

Technology is changing what customers expect from banks. Demand for digital experiences is increasing, and every customer has unique needs. Adapting to these expectations requires banks to improve the customer experience. A bonus? These changes also improve customer loyalty. Jyske Bank, Denmark's second-largest financial institution, is proactively improving its customer experience with relevant, timely communications tailored to individual customers’ needs.

Founded in 1967, Jyske Bank has 3,940 employees and approximately DKKkr800 billion (US$117 billion) on its balance sheet. Working with SAS, Jyske Bank is changing its approach to meeting customers’ needs and modernizing how it interacts with customers. The bank is using SAS Customer Intelligence 360 on Amazon Web Services (AWS) to better understand its customers’ needs and optimize marketing efforts.

“We want to preserve and expand our strong relationships with our existing customers,” says Tom Palving, Jyske Bank’s Center of Excellence Lead for Digital Communication and Sales Loyalty. “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 the frequency of interactions. Jyske Bank wants customers to visit often – not necessarily at a physical bank branch, but through digital channels. The bank sought a digital solution that could provide insights into each customer’s unique needs, build more customized touchpoints and design better user journeys..

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.”

Reimagining the mobile app experience

In addition to creating always-on campaigns, Jyske Bank has also been able to use this data to reimagine its mobile banking app. “Parallel to implementing the SAS Customer Intelligence 360 platform, we have rebuilt our mobile app to have a place where we meet our customers’ needs wherever they are in their lives,” says Palving.

In the app, Jyske Bank has created unique resources for different banking needs, like buying a house or financing a loan. Using the behavioral data in SAS Customer Intelligence 360, the team can better understand app behavior and create more engagement with customers for additional products and services.

“In many campaigns, we see a 10% to 50% increase in results when we use the behavioral data correctly,” says Palving.

Cloud hosting saves resources

Running SAS Customer Intelligence 360 on AWS represents one of the first cloud implementations at Jyske Bank. Palving expects great resource savings, 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.”