Public Sector Newsletter
April 2017
Deploy your transformation with data-driven insights
What you can learn from Royal Bank of Scotland
We looked at specific processes that are being transformed across government departments from HMRC to MOD and NHS, leveraging some of the lessons learnt from the private sector. Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) is a brilliant example of an organisation that reset its fundamental business strategy following a difficult period, and operationalised those objectives powered by a suite of sophisticated, yet quick-to-deploy analytics.
Like government departments, RBS knew it had to put its customers first. In the bank’s case, it desperately needed to rebuild the trust it had lost following a long and controversial period where it had put profits way ahead of customer needs. After the banking crisis, RBS’s customers were extremely vulnerable to poaching by competitors. Consequently, the firm understood that is needed to minimise all other considerations in order to put the customer front and centre.
Specifically, it needed to rebuild relationships by understanding the needs of its customers, transforming marketing relevance, and creating a uniquely personalised level of service by pinpointing where and how to deploy its business managers.
With such vast numbers of customers to please, clearly the solutions to these challenges had to come from the huge quantities of historical data the bank held on its consumers. It deployed SAS advanced analytics to uncover new insights, trends, model the outcomes of different customer service strategies and to help them learn from complaints by building a connected customer service operation. This allowed RBS to deploy a somewhat rationalised team to support its most valuable and loyal customers and take a different, more customer-centric approach to selling its financial products. A strategy that also boosted employee productivity.
If building relationships with service users is something that your department is tasked with, read about RBS’s story of transformation. Their ‘data guy’, the hugely inspiring Christian Nelissen, talks in depth about how the organisation executed such a wholesale transformation – and so quickly – to put the bank back on the road to a successful, ethical and profitable future. ‘SAS Introduces’… will soon present more stories of transformation from the perspective of very senior members of SAS’s customer community.