Customer satisfaction, sales surge with improved customer intelligence

Marketing optimization helps İşbank make meaningful connections, build loyalty and profits

Banks want to grow their customer base, but also keep existing customers satisfied. Turkey’s largest private bank, İşbank, is doing just that with an analytical approach to optimizing marketing messages to existing customers that has yielded sales and profitability improvement.

With millions of customers, İşbank sells to and serves them through a multiple touchpoint approach that includes more than 1,300 branches, over 6,500 ATMs and Internet, mobile and call center banking. “We have hundreds of products and service offers provided via different touchpoints,” says Engin Topaloğlu, the bank’s Retail Banking Marketing Manager. Figuring out which products to target to which customers had been complicated. For this, İşbank uses SAS^® Marketing Optimization.

New tactics lead to impressive results

Marketing optimization takes the guesswork out of assigning offers to customers, using an analytical approach that not only makes the choice, but delivers it. After deploying the solution, the bank saw remarkable improvement in branch campaign sales and profits. Marketing optimization analytically assigns the best offers to customers on a one-to-one basis. Optimization also looks at factors like propensity to buy, product revenue and channel lift to maximize marketing profit by increasing customer satisfaction.

Along with avoiding over- or under-contacting customers, SAS Marketing Optimization helps the bank budget for marketing campaigns. İşbank can combine constraints based on budget limits, channel capacities and contact policies, or create custom constraints, such as a minimum ROI or required revenue threshold. It can also run what-if scenarios.

One of the most critical aspects of the marketing optimization project is that it isn’t confined to email, mail, call center and mobile marketing. When bank employees are interacting with a customer, they see multiple offers on their computers, and they can give the best one to the customer. “Because we are making more suitable offers to all our customers, we’re seeing enhanced customer satisfaction,” Topaloğlu says.

Choosing an optimized approach

The bank knew it needed a partner with deep expertise in analytics to make marketing optimization work. And it needed a solution that was easy to work with. SAS Marketing Optimization has a browser-based interface that guides marketers through all optimization processes – including scenarios, constraints, reports and analyses – intuitively and logically. “SAS is helping us deliver the right product and service to the right customer at the right time,” Topaloğlu says.

Recognition for a job well done

İşbank and its customers aren’t the only ones who have acknowledged improvements since the marketing optimization solution was deployed. In honor of the bank’s effective, multiple touchpoint communication environment that provides customers with the services they need via advanced analytical and optimization techniques, İşbank received the Outstanding Innovation award as part of the world-renowned Global Business Excellence Awards. “We have enhanced customer satisfaction and increased our income and profitability thanks to the solutions offered by SAS,” Topaloğlu says. “The Global Business Excellence Award we obtained validates this improvement.”