2014 Bronze Financial Services

How did the campaign make a difference? MBNA’s campaign asked customers to use their automated “Text2Travel” service for travel notifications – required to enable their card for foreign transactions.

As well as providing a superb customer experience, this digital service gives MBNA significant cost efficiencies and time-saving benefits by migrating notifications away from their contact centre.

The results show the significant success achieved by using a multi-channel approach to migrate customers to these digital services – and how a 100% digital experience can provide superior customer service.

Strategy The strategy looked to take advantage of customers’ growing appetite for digital channels and self-service to remove contact centre bottlenecks caused by inefficient, last-minute travel notification calls – 75% of their 350,000 annual calls being received within five days of travel.

Migrating a proportion of travel notifications to the innovative “Text2Travel” service sped up notifications of travel plans and enabled customers to automatically activate their cards for foreign transactions.

Innovation within the campaign included the customer’s ability to activate their card by simply texting their travel date and destination, built-in spelling correction and automatic notification if a travel destination had card restrictions.

A multi-channel digital campaign targeted customers travelling abroad during the peak summer holiday months to promote awareness and engagement.

Creativity The 100% digital campaign targeted 2.3 million customers with emails during the three weeks before the peak summer holiday period. Customer data was segmented according to text services usage, partner affiliation and pre-advised travel plans, driving tailored and personalized content.

Online content: journeys based on data segmentation included an interstitial page within a secure site along with help/FAQ pages – all with consistent branding.

Customers then received an email confirmation of their “Text2Travel” request plus an SMS reminder the day before travelling – incorporated to eliminate “just calling to check” calls.

A follow-up email was then sent at the end of August to nonresponders from the original campaign, targeting those travelling after the main holiday period.

Results Results were outstanding – with 5,451 customer hours saved by using the automated service, 7,873 hours of manual account updates eliminated in the contact centre, resource savings in excess of £250k as a result of fewer calls, a 25% increase in online FAQ views and a 40% uplift in email open rates.

The over-arching impact is the simplicity of self-serving and the speed of the service – the automated service and follow up communications creating a seamless customer experience.

MBNA’s Customer Delight score, measured from customer surveys, increased during the campaign period by 6% – and direct customer feedback reflected the improvements with comments such as “I like being able to send a simple text... it’s so much easier than having to ring a helpline”.