Mindset transformation case study 2

Bahar Gand: Hello.

Bahar Gand: In this module, we have been discussing mindset transformation. We have explained how to enable clients to shift from a traditional campaign-based marketing approach to a customer-centric communication strategy. Now we would like to delve into a real client case who has achieved remarkable success in this topic. They have made a significant shift from Sigma-based marketing to a personalized one-to-one engagement strategy using a customer decision app. It's a pleasure to have Ludo Teurlings from Rabobank with us to share their experiences and insights on this transformation. Hello, Ludo.

Ludo Teurlings: Hi, thank you for joining us today.

Bahar Gand: Could you please introduce yourself and your organization?

Ludo Teurlings: Yes, certainly. My name is Ludo Teurlings. I work as a product manager for Rabobank. Rabobank is a Dutch cooperative bank founded by farmers and workmen exactly 125 years ago. We serve 9 million customers in the Netherlands, which is more than half of the population. We support both private and business customers. We have a strong base in the Netherlands but also have a worldwide presence in Food and Agriculture. I work in the area called Customer Engagement. We offer our internal stakeholders the infrastructure to communicate with our customers. We call this infrastructure the Rabobank Messaging Hub. A central part of the Rabobank Messaging Hub is Pega Customer Decisioning Hub. Pega CDH orchestrates communication via multiple channels. My role is the role of Product Owner for the delivery team that configures Pega CDH to meet Rabobank's needs and embed it in our IT landscape. We started implementing Pega CDH in the last quarter of 2018. We did and continue to do so in close cooperation with our marketing chapter and with our experts from data and analytics.

Bahar Gand: That's great. Thank you for this introduction. First of all, I would like to ask you how you initiated your customer decision hub project. Can you tell us about the major challenges you faced with your legacy marketing technology? What has really prompted you to seek new solutions in the marketplace?

Ludo Teurlings: Well, in 2018, we already had a data-driven focus on customer engagement and we put a lot of effort into optimizing our inbound and outbound campaigns using enriched customer profiles and taking advantage of predictive models. We introduced a lot of campaigns, each trying to select the best customer for their specific scope. However, with the growing number of campaigns, it got more complex to manage them all, especially in managing the contact policies. From the customer perspective, Pega CDH was considered a way of removing the challenge of managing campaigns by focusing on the individual customer. Another consideration for us was the better integration of both inbound and outbound messaging, supporting our expert users on the same customer profile and building the same eligibility rules for both directions.

Bahar Gand: That's great. So how did you start the project and after choosing it, what was your first channel and your use cases? How did it evolve over time?

Ludo Teurlings: We started by connecting Pega CDH to our website. At that time, multiple banners on our website were orchestrated by our legacy marketing technology. We were able to give Pega CDH full control before the end of 2018, within the first three months of starting the implementation. We decided to connect our website first because of the relatively low impact on our customers. Web banners are presented as part of the web page and do hold logic in the front end to show content even if Pega would not deliver any NBA in time. Already in 2018, the number of visitors on the website was decreasing, but at the same time, the usage of our mobile app grew. Being confident after the web implementation, we started in 2019 with the implementation of NBAs within our banking app. Our NBA is shown as a kind of a pop-up message when the customer logs into the app at the spot where the overview of the products held is shown to the customers. By adding our banking app as a second channel to Pega CDH, the number of presentations and customer responses multiplied. This was a very interesting time, seeing both Pega perform on high volume and monitoring the impact on our adaptive models. Still in 2019, we added a third channel to Pega CDH. This time we connected our call center where agents were shown three NBAs for incoming calls. We decided to implement the call center connection to have colleagues directly involved in discussing NBAs with customers in person, adding the human factor to our learnings. It created additional feedback next to the positive or negative outcome registration that improved our NBAs. The call center was connected incrementally, starting with two pilot teams and adding more teams in the following months. After the website, the banking app, and our inbound call center, we connected Pega CDH to our outbound channels, including email, outbound calling, and both text and push messages for mobile devices.

Bahar Gand: That's great. That sounds like a great strategy. Start with an inbound channel, show the value of CDH, and expand by use case and by channel. Now you have many channels covered. After all these use cases and channels combined, can you say that now CDH serves as the central brain for your customer engagement at Rabobank? Do you use CDH only for promotional communications or for other communications as well?

Ludo Teurlings: Our implementation started to enable marketing, sales, and service messages. For this purpose, we built an enriched customer profile holding both batch and streaming data. In the first years, we connected to the seven channels mentioned, used for marketing, sales, and service communication. Having these capabilities on data and these channels connected, we also invited other internal stakeholders to benefit from our infrastructure. We started to support so-called duty of care projects dealing with communication required by law or internal policy. You could think of product events like expirations. The logic is different from marketing, but we managed to make mandatory interactions part of the Pega decisioning. We also added additional channels like direct mail or an email inbox in our secured environment. Meanwhile, we grew to appreciate the streaming data feed to Pega more and more and added multiple use cases to enrich customer profiles. This real-time data setup is also helpful in supporting communication in specific customer journeys where we as a bank require additional information, want to confirm product modifications, or want to announce changes. Consider the example of a customer required to renew their mortgage interest agreement, presenting the customer with a new mortgage offer and guiding them on how to renew the agreement. That's an example of process support and communication taken care of by Pega CDH.

Bahar Gand: That sounds good. You also mentioned stakeholder engagement. How did you engage new stakeholders? We say that stakeholder engagement is critical to success. When starting CDH implementation, did you feel like you had the right stakeholders engaged in the one-to-one paradigm? Did any part of the organization face difficulty shifting from traditional marketing to a one-to-one engagement approach? Can you elaborate on this, please?

Ludo Teurlings: Before starting the Pega implementation, we first designed the required expertise and way of working together with different stakeholders and experts in our organization. We formed a steering committee at the time to support the implementation. In the steering committee, all stakeholders were represented by higher management. The steering committee monitored all implementation plans and was able to decide on any challenges that occurred. This was really helpful in getting the commitment of all involved parties and practically progressing on our implementation. Next to making decisions together, the steering committee also proved of great value for discussing and explaining the Pega CDH way of working, applying relevance arbitration. That was a huge change compared to business rule-driven campaigns in our legacy marketing technology. The impact of relying on propensity scores sometimes felt uncomfortable and uncontrollable. We introduced actions holding levers to boost the number of presentations, and there are still challenges to fully rely on propensities for low-volume audiences or for customer communication bound to a specific short period of time. But together, we grew in becoming more confident. If the right data is available and the right communication is designed, we can trust the adaptive model to recognize and uplift the most valuable communication. Let me refer to our end-of-year campaign for health insurance, which is an example of time-bound communication. Instead of using levers, marketing introduced a lot of different variants on the health insurance offers, relying on the adaptive model to find the right tone of voice for each customer and thereby boosting the overall volume via relevance arbitration.

Bahar Gand: That's really great. So your marketing team became more creative in creating variations rather than just using levers to boost communication to the clients. That's a great example. After all this implementation, how do you think the one-to-one engagement approach is helping Rabobank create even better relationships with your customers? Can you give some specific examples to demonstrate this?

Ludo Teurlings: With our broadened scope on customer communication, not only marketing, sales, and service but also mandatory and process-supporting communication, the scope of centralized orchestration has broadened. With our growing capability to orchestrate different kinds of communications, I feel we are more consistent, aligned, and therefore more customer-centric. I consider us no longer as just a marketing brain but as a centralized brain taking care of all customer communication, coordinated and where relevance is our main consideration. We take into account legal obligations where needed and follow the customer context where applicable. We mix all that together as a driver for our communication. It's even better orchestrated.

Bahar Gand: That's exactly what we want our clients to achieve. As a final question, what is in the pipeline for Rabobank? What are the next steps? How do you want to extend the usage of CDH? Do you plan to adopt new capabilities that are coming, for example?

Ludo Teurlings: I would like to mention two topics in this regard. First, introducing the centralized always-on brain for different kinds of communication, we want to improve in connecting these different kinds of communications. Take, for example, customers turning 18 years old. At this age, we see our customers make their own decisions, and we want to make sure they are aware of the benefits Rabobank offers for current and future financial plans. At the same time, we have strict legal requirements like identifying all customers turning 18 as a prerequisite to continue the customer relationship. We started a project to bundle different kinds of communication into a single customer journey from the customer perspective. By adding Pega CDH's customer journey feature in our logic, we want to learn about relevance arbitration in this regard. We also want to benefit from the out-of-the-box reporting that we can offer to our stakeholders. Next to the introduction of the customer journey, we also started experimenting with the use of Gen AI for creating multiple treatments on the same actions. In this way, we want to experiment with different tones of voice to better connect to that single customer in that specific context, helping them manage their financial challenges and opportunities.

Bahar Gand: That sounds great. Adding customer journeys and new Gen AI capabilities to your solution sounds great. Thank you so much, Ludo. It has been a really interesting and insightful discussion. I hope that our clients and partners will also appreciate your insights and benefit from your experiences. Thanks so much.

Ludo Teurlings: Very welcome. Thank you.

Bahar Gand: Thank you. Have a good day.

Ludo Teurlings: Thank you.