SAS analytics helps the bank improve its customer experience by making data driven decisions

The Royal Bank of Scotland Group plc (RBS) is using the power of data to achieve its goal of being the UK’s number one bank for customer service, trust and advocacy by 2020. Driven by the desire to do the right thing for customers, RBS is using data to transform its organisational processes and improve employee engagement so it can focus on customers’ needs and deliver excellent service. By tackling the bank’s biggest challenges with analytics from SAS, the leader in analytics software and services, RBS is able to make decisions designed to drive improvements in its multi-channel banking experience based on accurate and timely insights.

RBS provides financial products and services to personal and business customers throughout the UK. As a data-driven organisation, the bank recognises that its data holds the potential to provide invaluable insights that can revolutionise the way in which it connects with its customers.

With a focus on using data to underpin its core purpose of serving customers well, RBS has selected SAS as its strategic analytics provider. SAS software is deployed across the bank to improve operational efficiency and employee engagement to help RBS build stronger and more personal relationships.

The bank uses SAS to mine data, enabling it to understand context and the correlation between different data sets. The platform includes SAS® Visual Analytics, which enables analysis of very large data sets through an intuitive interface, and is currently being rolled out to over 10,000 users. RBS’s data-driven approach delivers benefits including:

• Personalised experiences – RBS has created better personalised connections with its customers based on conversations across its customer channels and touch-points. By analysing and understanding its data better, its employees and customers are having more personalised and valuable conversations be it online, face-to-face or over the phone, resulting in improved customer experience.
• Employee transformation– Armed with visibility into common themes behind agent errors, RBS identified that a significant portion of complaints came from agents that had been in post for less than a certain timeframe. To improve the customer experience and reduce complaints, RBS is now offering personalised coaching to individual team members and frontline colleagues in identified areas.
• Connected complaints –By analysing big data, including unstructured and textual data, RBS has a much clearer picture of complaints to deliver a faster resolution for customers. For example, a customer that isn’t able to cancel a direct debit within 24 hours may be satisfied with the service that an agent delivered but unhappy with the process. By having the relevant data available in a single dashboard, RBS is able to identify the issue and respond with improvements to the process, branch or team.

“We chose SAS because we wanted a single organisation to deliver our advanced analytics leads across the whole of the bank’s data estate. We have worked closely with SAS over a number of years and they stand out as being industry leaders,” said Christian Nelissen, the Data Guy at RBS. “Our clear strategy is to be the number one bank for customer service, trust and advocacy by 2020. A key part of delivering that strategy is based on improving our customer experience by knowing more about our customers, our business, our employees and how we are delivering services. In turn, this data is enabling us to drive transformational change across the RBS Group that allows us to achieve our ambition of earning customers’ trust by serving their needs better than any other bank.”

“Data analytics can help RBS drive change across its organisation and deliver against its vision of becoming the UK’s number one bank for customer service, trust and advocacy by 2020,” said Mark Wilkinson, SAS Regional Vice President – Northern Europe. “Making smarter, faster decisions based on accurate data means change can happen quickly and the likelihood of mistakes being repeated is significantly reduced.  RBS is really harnessing the power of its data to transform its business and we are delighted to be part of this journey.”