CaixaBank leads customers into a new era of personalized banking with Adobe Campaign

March 2021 was a big month for Spain’s banking sector. In addition to marking one year since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, it also signalled the official merger between CaixaBank and Bankia, forming Spain’s largest banking entity.

CaixaBank’s transformation does not end there. The company is also focused on improving its omnichannel customer experience. CaixaBank already offers Spain’s biggest branch and ATM network, but for Adrián Müller, Director of Customer Omnichannel Activation at CaixaBank Business Intelligence, the key is to complement this physical footprint with a more personalised customer experience across every touchpoint.

The first step was to invest in the technologies needed to fuel the bank’s omnichannel strategy. CaixaBank previously relied on a range of homegrown solutions to fuel its digital marketing, but in recent years, it became clear these could no longer keep up with advances in the market or shifts in customer behaviour.

“Banking is a highly regulated industry, which is why so many organizations in our field build their technologies in-house. But as a company we understood it was time for a reset, especially if we want to roll out increasingly personalised and automated campaigns informed by customer behaviour,” says Müller.

A new approach to campaign orchestration

“CaixaBank Business Intelligence (CBI) oversees the transformation of vast volumes of customer data, with a particular focus on improving the customer experience,” says Cristina Lázaro, Executive President CaixaBank Business Intelligence. “We use the information we collect from the bank’s various customer touchpoints to build predictive models, which in turn allow us to better understand our audience and inform campaign orchestration”.

CaixaBank Business Intelligence manages more than 400 of these models at any given time, which is why it now relies on Adobe Campaign to turn all of the data it collects into customer value. The solution allows it to create precise customer segments and work closely with the bank’s marketing team to deploy targeted and relevant campaigns.

Müller points to a recent campaign promoting Samsung’s latest mobile phone, as an example. After diving into the data on Caixabank’s 20 million customers to find the most relevant segments through highly sophisticated predictive models, the team used Adobe Campaign to create segments of high-propensity targets, ensuring that their message would go to the right people and have the highest chance of hitting the mark.

CaixaBank also uses Adobe Campaign for its customer lifecycle management, covering the entire customer journey from engagement emails, to lead nurturing, to re-activation. For instance, if a CaixaBank customer applies and receives a new credit card, the bank needs to send them a message reminding them to activate it before trying to make a purchase. Adobe Campaign allows CaixaBank to trigger this message automatically and send it to the right customer on their preferred channel.

“We believe in a true omnichannel approach that goes beyond email and SMS,” says Müller. “That’s why we connect with customers through our mobile app, our website, and even our ATMs”. CaixaBank sees its ATM network as an extension of its website, regularly drawing on customer profiles and behavioural data to present people with personalised offers while they wait for their ATM transactions to go through.

Thanks to the integration between Adobe Campaign and Adobe Audience Manager, the company’s omnichannel capabilities also extend to paid promotion, including Facebook advertisements. For instance, if a customer doesn’t open an important email campaign that based on propensity we know he is interested in, the bank can automatically trigger a targeted ad to the same individual on their Facebook so they don’t miss the message.

Crucially for Müller, CaixaBank can continuously refine the behavioural triggers that define the bank’s personalised campaign. All of the propensity data collected by CaixaBank Business Intelligence is looped back into the team’s predictive models, helping them to better understand customer preferences and target them with the right message on the right channels.

More personalization ahead

CaixaBank began using Adobe Campaign in 2019, supported by its integration partner, Accenture. The company’s aim at the time was to centralise all of its communications across every channel, with a focus on its digital offering.

“We looked at the capabilities we needed, including customer segmentation, orchestration, marketing automation, and others, and Adobe Campaign was the clear choice,” says Müller. Today, the solution also integrates with the bank’s broader Adobe investment and plays a central role in its marketing technology stack.

“Before 2019, most of our campaigns were one-offs. We had begun to personalise our website and mobile app to some degree, but the experience for our customers was disconnected from what they received in-branch. I’m proud to say that is no longer the case,” Müller adds.

CaixaBank is now shaping the next phase of its digital transformation. Among a number of initiatives, the team has begun using Adobe Campaign to automate CaixaBank’s customer news feed, taking the burden off the bank’s financial advisors to write individual general communications while ensuring that audiences never miss important updates on new products and services.

CaixaBank Business Intelligence also plans to build on the enhancements to CaixaBank’s campaign orchestration with an increasingly context-driven approach automation and customer communications. Mr. Müller shares an extreme example to illustrate his point:

“Let’s say it’s your birthday. CaixaBank would traditionally send you an email to celebrate valued customer. Meanwhile, your car insurance expires in four weeks, which also prompts an automated message, on top of which you abandoned a purchase in your cart yesterday, which triggers yet another message. That’s three emails in one day, and even if they are each relevant we want to get better at prioritizing and spacing our communications out,” Müller says.

CaixaBank understands that personalisation at scale is about more than efficiency. It is about striking the right balance between volume and quality. “CaixaBank has always prided itself on our personalised approach to supporting customers at our retail branches,” he says, “and that’s a value that continues to guide even as we evolve for the realities of a digital economy”.

To learn more about how CaixaBank invested in rearranging siloed and disconnected functions to create a connected omnichannel experience, register for the Adobe Summit session, Delivering Consistent, Personalized Omnichannel Experiences, 1pm, Wednesday 28th April, here.