Getting to know the customers

Raiffeisen Bank Belgrade offers the right offer at the right time to grow profits

While some Serbian banks chase after deposits, Dragan Mikičić knows there is a better route to profitability.

As the Head of the CRM department at Raiffeisen Bank Belgrade, Mikičić has helped propel the bank’s profitability by personalizing offers so well that more than 25 percent of the solicited customers respond to the offer and 14 percent accept it. That compares with a rate of 1 percent before Mikičić began using customer analytics solutions from SAS.

“We don’t send the same offer to all of our customers anymore. Those ‘spray and pray’ promotions are expensive and don’t work,’’ Mikičić says.

Duplicate efforts are also a thing of the past. “We would send out emails for one campaign, and then the contact center would call customers for other products. It wasn’t very well coordinated.’’

Succeeding in a tough banking environment

Like so many countries, Serbia has struggled through tough economic times in recent years. The banking sector has been hit hard as negative growth has rocked the economy. To thrive, Mikičić says that Raiffeisen needed to change.

The focus needed to shift to customers who might be interested in the bank’s other financial products. It invested in mobile platforms and scaled back the growth of expensive brick-and-mortar branches. Today, just 83 branches serve Raiffeisen’s 550,000 customers – half what its nearest competitor has.

With the decrease in face-to-face interaction, employees may miss opportunities to gather information that would help them offer relevant banking products. Mikičić uses analytics to substitute knowledge gleaned from customer transaction data for missed in-person conversations. His team of two analysts and three campaign managers supports 2,000 customized campaigns a year.

Building on success

Mikičić’s team ran its first successful pilot campaigns just three months after adopting analytics in 2010. Since then his team has:

• Next best offer (NBO) in place.
• Worked on innovative cross-sell promotions.
• Segmented customers into 25 categories for customized retention offers that are triggered by a drop-off in credit card use. Credit card churn dropped by 4 percent.
• Added risk scores to the segmentation process so customers with poor bill-paying habits don’t inadvertently receive a retention offer.

This data-driven approach to getting to know its customers has been well received at the bank and recognized by Raiffeisen’s other subsidiaries.

Closing deals

But the real proof of success is in metrics that the bank compiles. Mikičić’s eight-person team is the leading contributor to bank sales. CRM-generated leads account for 32 percent of package sales, 41 percent of personal loan sales, 36 percent of accepted credit card offers and 62 percent of overdraft protection purchases.

“This is working very smoothly. The channel managers are happy with our work. And we can launch a new campaign in as little as a week,’’ he says. “We’re also running a lot of campaigns automatically. We couldn’t do all of this without analytics.’’