Omnichannel banking centered around customers

TSB is one of the UK’s most trusted retail banks, serving more than five million customers across the country. Marrying a heritage that stretches back over 200 years with a modern banking platform, TSB offers a full range of financial services, including current and savings accounts, loans and mortgages, and insurance.

TSB’s customer-centric strategy sets it apart from most UK banks. “While large legacy players struggle to modernize in-line with customers’ needs, and digital-only banks can be limited in the types of services they can deliver, we offer the best of both worlds,” says Kavin Mistry, Head of Digital Marketing and Personalization at TSB. “Combined with unmatched levels of personalization, that makes our value proposition difficult to beat.”

To that end, TSB partnered with Adobe in 2018 to transform its omnichannel offering. The ability to collect, analyze, and draw insight from customer data in real-time across channels was a top priority. And with Customer Data Platforms on the rise, TSB wanted to lead the charge among UK banks in adopting a more unified and responsive approach to delivering personalization at scale.

Banking experiences for an omnichannel world

TSB’s transformation was not without its challenges, one being that there were too many steps and silos in its data workflows. Upon receiving a customer request, it would take between three and five days for the bank to process the question and respond.

TSB was also limited in the types of data it could use to inform its customer experiences. Teams could only source unstructured information in the bank’s data warehouse, giving them limited visibility into customers’ behavior on different channels. To process this data, they then had to move it into an IT layer, then into a series of servers and files, and finally to TSB’s database. The lag between each of these steps was 24 hours, which meant latency of three to nine days from the moment TSB collected customer data, to being able to action that information.

As for email marketing, TSB previously relied on a third party to create and send emails to its customers. A 10-day SLA to create new email templates made it virtually impossible for marketers to deliver personalized communications to customers in real time, and it quickly became a major bottleneck in one of the bank’s most effective and economical sales channels.

Under the banner of “Making customers money-confident”, TSB joined forces with Adobe to break down marketing silos and replace disjointed campaigns with unified experiences that put customers at the center. “Working with Adobe, we set out to flip the financial sector’s product-focused sales model on its head and turn TSB’s marketing into a true customer-centric operation,” says Kavin.

A game-changing experience platform

TSB was the first financial services company in the UK to implement Adobe Experience Platform. While many banks start their digital transformations from the outside in, focusing on endpoint experiences to treat the symptoms of their disjointed customer journey, TSB wanted to rebuild and reimagine its approach from the inside out.

Replacing its legacy CRM system, Adobe Experience Platform, combined with its native customer experience applications, Adobe Real-Time Customer Data Platform, Adobe Customer Journey Analytics, and Adobe Journey Optimizer, gave TSB a central platform on which to build a true one-to-one communications strategy.

TSB began to join up its customer experience across all its online and offline channels, including mobile, web, direct channels, email, SMS and direct mail, paid media, bank branches, and its telephone services. Adobe Experience Platform was the only platform that could allow data to flow seamlessly between TSB’s channels and make real-time customer profiles available across each, fueling more impactful cross-channel customer journeys while making the bank’s marketing operations faster and more cost-effective.

“Adobe Experience Platform was a game-changer. We used to offer very little personalization, just a handful of offers,” says Morgan Reavey, Senior CRM Manager at TSB. “Since working with Adobe, we’ve scaled from delivering hundreds of campaigns and offers to our customers, to thousands.”

Crucially, the bank was able to reduce latency in its data processes from approximately three to nine days to less than 24 hours, while gaining the ability to collect more data in more formats from every customer channel and process that data in-flow to deliver real-time personalization.

As for the bank’s social and pay-per-click marketing, TSB’s teams previously had to manually upload data from these channels to its systems once per week, making the bank reactive on platforms that are all about proactivity and timing. By automating these processes with Adobe, TSB has not only made its operations more efficient, but it has also made social and pay-per-click content timelier and more compelling for customers.

The real-time data capabilities TSB has gained from Adobe Experience Platform and its applications have helped the bank to move away from reactive marketing, like generic email blasts, and towards strategies that have made it a go-to financial partner for life for its customers. Most importantly, the shift in approach delivered results that exceeded TSB’s expectations, generating 11x more incremental income than expected. In fact, 6% of the bank’s total revenue is now earned through its digital marketing channels — testament to TSB’s commitment to customer centricity and the service it provides to its customers.

“Whether they’re buying a car, booking a holiday, or taking out a mortgage to buy their first house, we are there to support our customers through every twist and turn of their financial journey,” says Morgan. “Adobe Experience Platform and its applications are the glue that makes this possible, unifying our data and customer understanding across channels.”

Real-time experiences that come from the heart

Adobe Experience Platform and its applications sit at the heart of TSB’s data-driven operations, allowing it to build, update and act on real-time customer profiles. The bank uses Adobe Real-Time Customer Data Platform to unify data from across its customer channels and IT systems in real time to a gain a 360-degree profile of each of its millions of customers. This capability has helped TSB to break down the silos between its customer data streams and combine this information into a format that delivers more than the sum of its parts.

“Most customer profiles are a snapshot of the past, especially by the time you process that customer’s data in a usable format. With Adobe Real-Time CDP, we can build dynamic profiles that evolve with our customers and tell us who they are in the moment,” says Morgan.

One of the most telling wins for TSB has been the rise in engagement with its omnichannel services. Digital and mixed online and offline engagement now represent over 80% of the bank’s customer interactions, with services like live video chat with TSB agents and web chat with its interactive bots taking off overnight.

Customer journeys powered by data

Adobe Customer Journey Analytics and Adobe Analytics are the bank’s day-to-day workhorses, providing TSB with an up-to-the minute view of its customers’ behavior even as they move between web, online, and physical channels, including its call center. With actionable customer insights, TSB’s Marketing teams can break that data down further to gain unparalleled insight into what each customer needs and how their banking journey can be improved every step of the way.

Together, the solutions promise to drive continuous improvements to TSB’s omnichannel journeys informed by hard data from its most reliable source, its customers. Adobe Journey Optimizer also allows TSB to follow and optimize each journey at the individual level, no matter which channel or combination of channels customers use to interact with its services. From there, Offer Decisioning helps to personalize customer experiences on its mobile app, secure banking website, and UK website.

All retargeting on these channels is now personalized in real time to enrich users’ journey at every turn. And with Adobe Target, TSB can test, refine, and improve those experiences, making them more personalized every time.

“We couldn’t achieve any of these goals without centralizing all our data in one place, which is where Adobe Experience Platform excels,” says Morgan. “The capabilities we’ve gained are helping TSB to reach, acquire, and engage new customers, on top of strengthening our existing relationships.”

A hyper-personalized future

Data now powers every performance-based marketing activity at TSB, with customer journey design sitting at the heart of the bank’s strategy. Drawing on both first and third-party data, the next step for the bank is to nail its next-best action strategies. The rich data they collect will help TSB’s marketers understand what message to send, when to send it, and where. As importantly, they’ll know when to hang back and let customers reach out to the bank themselves.

This maturation of TSB’s marketing approach reflects a broader cultural shift at the bank towards customer-centric experience design. Where many institutions roll out marketing campaigns based on internal sales priorities, TSB is moving towards a dialogue that puts customers in control of what content and promotions they see and when.

Setting its eyes on the future, TSB is on course to move towards hyper-personalized experiences. In addition to drawing on customer data to target the right message to the right individual, it wants to further develop how it personalizes the visual assets that customers see when interacting with any TSB platform, be it a targeted banner advert in their browser or a promotional video on the TSB website.

“By combining data-driven personalization with content personalization, we will have hit the Holy Grail of marketing,” says Kavin. “And as it has been since 2018, Adobe’s technology will be the backbone of that journey.”