Wachovia grows customer satisfaction, loyalty
Heightened competition in the financial services industry is driving Wachovia Corp. and other institutions to become more customer-focused. With help from SAS, Wachovia – one of the largest providers of financial services to retail, brokerage and corporate customers – has achieved increased customer loyalty and profitability since placing an emphasis on customer satisfaction in 1999.
Wachovia Bank uses SAS to explore and define customer equity – all in an effort to understand the true, long-term value of happy customers. Wachovia now surpasses industry peers in customer satisfaction and customer loyalty rankings.
Driving customer loyalty
Using SAS software for analysis and reporting, Wachovia rigorously measures customer loyalty and uses that information to make business decisions. The bank harnesses the power of SAS to analyze survey results alongside historical customer data on Wachovia's 13 million customers. With these results, the bank can understand what loyalty means to Wachovia and what drivers affect customer loyalty.
"Over the years, customer loyalty has become a more important measurement than customer satisfaction," says Kelly Campbell, Senior Vice President and Director of Customer Satisfaction and Loyalty Performance Measurement and Improvement at Wachovia Bank. "This is because loyal customers stay with us longer, buy more products and services, create good word-of-mouth referrals, and reduce customer acquisition and servicing costs. We see customer loyalty as a continuum where you move from being not loyal to being completely loyal, or somewhere in between. We've used SAS to better define actionable areas on that loyalty curve to target particular customers."
Meeting customer needs
With SAS, Wachovia provides customer analysis for each unique channel and banking group – including wholesale banking, Wachovia Direct and the e-commerce division. The intelligence derived from this analysis helps Wachovia determine how to spend its marketing dollars to address a customer's unique needs and provide more targeted customer service.
Wachovia consistently outscores its peers in the esteemed Customer Satisfaction Index compiled annually by the University of Michigan. And according to Gallup surveys, more than half of Wachovia's customers would gladly recommend the bank to a friend.
Wachovia's next step in its customer intelligence initiative is to define customer equity – a lifetime measurement of how much value each customer brings to the bank, and more importantly, how Wachovia can improve each customer's value. To accomplish this plan, Wachovia is depending on SAS to assist in the complex analysis and data management.
Increasing customers' value
"Executives want to know, if we increase a customer's value, how much extra profit that means to the bank every year," says Dan Thorpe, Senior Vice President and Statistics and Modeling Director of Wachovia's Customer Analysis Research and Targeting (CART) Group. "We're using SAS to really understand and model our customer's balance history, their revenues, their profits, the number of products and their tenure. We're trying to roll it all up into a measurement called customer equity, which requires a very sophisticated analytical depth that plays in to why we're using SAS."
"With nearly 30 years of serving the financial services industry, SAS combines superior analytics with award-winning data management capabilities to ensure that an organization's customer relationships, marketing efforts and corporate strategies achieve optimal results," says Ellen Joyner, Global Industry Strategist for Financial Services at SAS.
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