Kavin Mistry

Head of Digital Marketing and Personalization, TSB

Supernova Award Category: 
Marketing & Sales Effectiveness
The Organization: 

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. 

The Problem: 

TSB had too many steps and silos in its data workflows. Upon receiving a customer request, it would take between three and nine 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.

The Solution: 

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.

The Results: 

The following results were achieved:

  • Improved engagement and conversion across channels
  • Ability to deliver personalized experiences at every stage of the customer journey
  • The breaking down of silos and reduced latency in data workflows
Metrics: 
  • Incremental revenue 11x higher than expected
  • 6% of total revenue earned through digital marketing channels
  • 300% increase in loan sales among mobile users thanks to real-time personalization
  • 80% of customer interactions now come via digital or mixed channels
  • 90% reduction in latency from the ingestion to actioning of customer data
The Technology: 

Replacing a 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.

Note: In addition, TSB use Adobe Analytics, Adobe Target, Offer Decisioning, Adobe Campaign Standard

Disruptive Factor: 

TSB unified everything from demographic, behavioral, to contextual customer data, and to product, transactional, financial, and third-party data. 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,

Shining Moment: 

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.

About TSB

TSB is a retail bank with a trusted customer brand, heritage stretching back to the start of the savings bank movement 200 years ago, and a committed workforce that offer full service banking to more than five million customers. We operate on a modern banking platform and serve our customers through digital channels, over the phone and in branches across the UK.