Bank of Ireland Global Markets

Global Markets is the Treasury arm of Bank of Ireland, the country’s largest bank. It is responsible for managing the sophisticated and diverse financial needs of major domestic and global companies, across a wide range of services, including Foreign Exchange, Money Markets, Bonds and Derivatives.

At the time, the market was saturated by a host of treasury providers who were offering clients reduced margins, to secure their business.  As a result, the management team at Global Markets made the strategic decision to become even more customer focused. The team knew that by building deeper, more meaningful relationships with customers, it would give it the competitive advantage it needed, to retain its No.1 position in the market.

Bank of Ireland Global Markets approached Chilli Pepper to assist it with the development of an enhanced Customer Engagement Strategy that would be focussed on its core customer segments.

The objective was clear; to identify ways to create and maintain long-term relationships with its customers, that would drive increased customer value and higher levels of retention.

Our approach to this project included analysing the value of each customer to the Bank, to identify better ways to engage with them and then rolling out the Customer Engagement Strategy to deliver highly tailored engagement across each customer touch point.  All of this was designed to drive better service delivery, more meaningful relationships and to deliver on the Bank’s customer retention objective.

We began by developing a bespoke customer valuation model, which pulled data from a variety of internal sources, including transactions, value, margin per deal, potential value and propensity to churn. At the end of this step, we had complete clarity as to who the high value customers were and which of the mid-value customers had the potential to migrate up the value chain.

We then conducted an audit of all the customer touch-points, including the assigned Relationship Manager, communications sent and events that they were invited to.  The purpose was to understand how the brand was performing against the industry ‘norms’ and where the opportunities lay to cement the relationships with these valuable customers.

The Relationship Manager played a vital role in identifying exactly what the customers expected from their relationship with the Bank and what could be improved to increase the level of tailored service to each customer.

This audit resulted in a very clear understanding of where enhancements needed to be made across each customer touch-point in order to deliver a more tailored service and better customer engagement.

As a result, the enhanced Financial Services Customer Engagement Strategy was developed which led a major step-change for the way that the Bank valued, serviced and engaged with its customers.

We worked closely with the internal teams to implement the Customer Engagement Strategy, which focussed on different engagement levels for each customer tier.

These included highly tailored and bespoke communication, a tiered events schedule and appointing the most suitable Relationship Manager for each customer. This ensured that customers received the perfect mix of tailored communication and personalised interaction, all delivered from the right point of contact within the Bank.

By identifying the value of each customer, learning more about their needs, preferences and service requirements, and rewarding them for their continued support, Global Markets saw a +33% migration of the customers up to a higher value tier and increased its customer satisfaction score by +8% in one year.