RBS: Driving Marketing Communications for Cards Customer Management

Working with RBS for the last 7 years to develop its marketing communications strategy has given Occam an unrivalled knowledge and experience of their acquisition and retention challenges.  Occam was selected to host and maintain the credit card database for all brands in 2001. Over this period both the number and the complexity of marketing campaigns has increased in a market where customers are more selective and knowledgeable, and have more information than ever to help make financial decisions.

This competitive environment has required RBS to change and to adopt a multi-channel approach for optimal contact, including the functionality to carry out trigger based marketing.  This has lead to a significant change in strategy and day-to-day working for the Cards Marketing teams.

What was the challenge we needed to solve?

RBS historically provided Occam with monthly data feeds, and marketing was run monthly and prepared quarterly. This was excellent for large scale communications, but inflexible and had limited scope for reactive event based targeting. RBS needed a solution that could manage a trigger based marketing strategy alongside traditional large scale monthly campaigns.

The existing methodology delivers successful targeting within and across campaigns. Lifecycle campaigns are aimed at stimulating / maintaining customer activity and there is a strong focus on ROI.  The use of analytics and ‘test & learn’ techniques are core to all activities.  This leads to high volume and high frequency contacts across the base with well tested and targeted knowledge developed over a long period.

The weaknesses are an extended time to market, and rising costs per campaign. Many campaigns are hand crafted, and with targeting becoming increasingly more complex, this is putting more pressure on the process. Added to this was a greater demand for new campaign content and digital print, as well as the ability to respond quickly to customer events.

How did we go about solving it?

Occam was tasked with developing an in-house solution that would provide:

• The architecture & business rules for event based capability and greater throughput

• An overhaul the existing data schema

• Lights out processing of trigger based campaigns

• Campaign hierarchy – full recording of contact rules

• Automated response reporting

Occam’s response was an interim database (Account Management Strategy – AMS) to sit between the Faststats campaign management tool that could house contact history information from all Direct Marketing run by Occam as well as contacts from other sources such as 3rd party partners and inbound call centre contacts. This database is hosted at Occam with web enabled access for RBS.

What results did we achieve with this solution?

• New capabilities for the Cards Marketing teams allowing event based activity.  These include time on book, significant life events such as marriage, the birth of a child or moving house, transaction events (categories, change in spend) and changes in customer preferences.

• Between 50-100% uplift in typical campaign response.

• Significant improvements in efficiency with additional campaigns delivered with no significant increase in headcount internally or externally.

• Test and learn environment, built to take new offers to market at the right time for the right customer through the right channel.

• Customer centric account management giving marketing and communications a process to enact new campaigns at speed

• Multi-channel contact. Ability to tailor message to customer preferences

• Speed to contact. Highly reduced time to contact through refined process

• Consistent contact management. A first step towards fully managing contacts across all channels – inbound and outbound