Intelligent credit tracking and trigger-based marketing with BSI at Hanseatic

Hanseatic Bank, a subsidiary of Société Générale, the large French bank, and Hamburg-based Otto Group is known for its secure credit cards, loans and investments as well as top-notch customer service. Many Hanseatic Bank customers are so-called partial payers who pay their outstanding balances over several months. To ensure that these outstanding amounts are not too high, the bank must constantly check credit limits and process customer orders promptly. As a result of implementing the BSI Customer Suite, Hanseatic Bank can now resolve customer inquiries faster and more efficiently. Additionally, thanks to a trigger-based marketing approach, the bank can now reach out to its customers on the right channel, at the right time and with the right message.

Before BSI, a Hanseatic Bank contact center had the initial phone contact with customers. Yet, as an external service provider, the contact center could not directly access Hanseatic’s internal banking systems, which means the bank had to extract data regularly and forward them securely to the contact center. This process generated a considerable amount of work for the bank and did not allow the bank always to answer all customer inquiries promptly. Further, the contact center had to forward more complex requests to the bank first, which meant Hanseatic Bank could only process those with a time delay – often not until one day later. So, it was necessary to give the call takers a 360° view of the customer data to reduce their workload and process customer inquiries faster and more efficiently. It is the only way to clarify as many questions as possible, such as those about the current account balance, in the initial customer conversation.

“Our relationship with BSI is very good; it is a partnership. Our contacts at BSI are always willing to listen to us, and they consistently and promptly try to find solutions that work for us. So much so that in addition to accommodating our requirements and change requests, they also apply them to the continued development of the software. You see, at BSI, you are not only a customer; you are a partner above all.”
Nicole Melson, Head of Existing Customer Marketing at Hanseatic Bank

Easy credit tracking with active change management and the right technology

By implementing BSI CRM, Hanseatic Bank met the requirements described above. Today, employees have direct access to all relevant customer data and can process a wide variety of requests in real time and manage them intelligently. To ensure a successful implementation of this technical solution, Hanseatic Bank put in place both a technical project manager from the IT department and a specialist project manager from marketing. In addition, it provided its employees with a training team, training materials and “floor workers.” The latter were available to the workforce as on-site contact persons to provide immediate assistance. These were all critical factors that made the introduction of the new software solution a success because user acceptance is not an insignificant factor. In a second phase, Hanseatic Bank’s outsourcing partners implemented the solution. Thanks to the 360° customer view and business case automation, the bank can now resolve customer inquiries faster and more efficiently and accept more orders than before and process them on first contact.

New opportunities for (activation) campaigns

In addition to the CRM, Hanseatic Bank also uses the Digital Experience Platform BSI CX to support its steady growth, which has partly occurred because of the successful implementation of BSI’s new CRM system. Some of the activities the bank uses this solution for are trigger-based campaigns, birthday or welcome mailings and, more recently, NPS measurements. Thanks to BSI, Hanseatic Bank can now also turn simple customer journeys into multi-level campaigns quickly and flexibly, create landing pages with forms for marketing campaigns and select target groups. “BSI makes our marketing activities fast, flexible and measurable,” explained Melson. “The BSI Customer Suite has impressed us with its comprehensive reporting, the opportunity to manage multi-level campaigns easily, and the almost unlimited options for activating new and existing customers. We no longer need an external agency or service provider to create the majority of our campaigns – all we get from them now are new designs and images for the templates, which means more flexibility and lower costs.”

A look ahead

Yet, Hanseatic Bank does not want to dwell on the status quo. The bank plans to use Artificial Intelligence in the coming months to create customer mailings with personalized topics, content, and design. Also, it wants to have incoming e-mails automatically assigned to the corresponding customers and actions, which offers immense potential for efficiency increases and reduces employees’ workloads. For example, the bank will be able to automatically control which customer receives which e-mail components in a design and with content suitable for him or her. Nicole Melson and her team are thrilled about the resulting potential opportunities for trigger-based marketing campaigns.