2016 Gold Best use of mobile and/or connected devices

Agency Barclays Africa

Client In-house

Campaign summary

A text from the bank before you run into money troubles

Campaign overview

Next generation banking needs proactive and predictive measures that identify and work to resolve threats to customers before they materialise.

Predictive customer analytics can power the use of personalised and targeted intelligence and interactive SMS to address issues before they occur.

Strategy

The campaign used predictive analytics to find customers who would benefit from technology to find and resolve potential threats.

Data-driven strategies and decision making were used to identify customers based on one-to-one behaviour so that messages were personalised.

Social media was a core channel, but the campaign focused on interactive SMS. Customers preferred this and they engaged via SMS, and could connect with a bank agent instantly.

SMS responses were given at no cost to the customer, key to campaign success. Using SMS, Barclays Africa could engage customers in near real-time before they hit scheduled payment issues. Rapid product delivery was a key factor, as was fully developing this solution in 90 days, giving the customer a proactive solution through the adoption of predictive analytics as a collections strategy (a first for the bank).

Creativity

Data models and engines were used to build default and payment profiles of customers to identify thresholds and behaviours.

From this, Barclays Africa could validate its predictive defaulting analysis.

The problem alert was a proactive solution. One of the key creative aspects was to change how customers engage through SMS. Usually, a generic message is sent and the customer pays to reply. The campaign used interactive, personalised SMS - there was no contact number or generic reply path.

Customers were led towards an agent they could speak to in real time if they wished, for free. The solution also focused on providing customers with these alerts in advance of probable payment conflicts which enabled Barclays Africa to help customers before they defaulted.

Results

The results showed customers wanted the service to continue, with 81% customer satisfaction. Technqiues on how to engage, select and cost SMS, the use of data science for predictive analytics to personalise and identify problems before they materialised and the engagement model all worked to increase satisfaction.

This was also supported by a 20% engagement rate - up circa 18% on traditional campaigns. The adoption rate of 36% drove retention and improvement of ROI and commercial value while treating customers fairly.

Further metrics showed an additional 20% of customers looked to address their potential defaults through other affordable date options resulting in around 50% of customers taking some form of corrective action on potential defaults.

Team

Tyron Reddy (Product Owner) • Aditya Gupta (Delivery Manager) • Vikash Sharma (Data Scientist) • Mrutunjay Tiwari (Data Scientist)