BNP Paribas Fortis is Belgium’s largest bank and the largest company in financial asset management worldwide. The bank’s activity is focused on three client segments: retail clients, companies and entrepreneurs, and private banking.
Following is an explanation of how the bank manages a clear client-oriented strategy and the role Marigold Engage plays as an ally to put the customer first across all activities and channels.
In recent years, client expectations have evolved significantly, with an increased focus on the customer across all sectors, including and especially the financial world. Banks have been among the most innovative companies when it comes to marketing and communication – and this is definitely the case with BNP Paribas Fortis.
BNP Paribas Fortis operates from a strong drive for innovation and modernity, yet also at the same time from an emphasis on human values such as attentiveness, accessibility, and warmth. Customer service is essential throughout all channels: offices, online banking, contact center, self-banking, and mobile banking.
BNP Paribas Fortis gives high priority to five promises:
Today, clients are truly cross-channel, with online channels playing a leading role in the bank’s proposition. All possible ways to optimize contact moments with clients are used, to offer the most valuable and personal service.
As digital habits and channels continue to evolve, Marigold Engage offers an ideal solution to these digital changes with its multi-channel interactive marketing platform. To address evolving consumer behavior requires being able to offer an integrated and consistent customer experience across all client contacts. A centralized data model is key to succeed in this.
At BNP Paribas Fortis, Marigold Engage has been integrated in all channels where customers can request information, open accounts, or add new services that the bank offers. Data is collected via website, automatically passed onto the contact center, and also added to the bank’s other applications. The application further steers all emails, so it can be used by local branch managers to send secure and personalized emails to their customers, based on a centralized system to ensure consistency. Finally, all web forms are managed by Selligent. Selligent is used throughout the entire fulfillment of applications and in the decentralization of content, both in the email and mobile channels.
Since banks deal with very confidential data and have strict requirements in the area of security, BNP Paribas Fortis worked together intensively with the Selligent team when integrating the tool. This required an intensive analysis, where the Selligent team helped enormously. It was truly a meeting of two worlds: that of a high transactional security, with that of interactive marketing. The marriage between the transactional, informative, and interactive aspect wasn’t only about security, but also about market evolutions.
Where the bank used to have an informative and purely transactional component regarding the internet, it now much more interactively can start a relationship with the consumer online.
This evolution also has an impact on communication, as every channel has its own way of dealing with communication. The media mix is also changing. Conventional media remains important, but has been increasingly more supplemented with new media, including social, which is used by the bank for campaigns and to listen to the customer.
In order to realize its client-oriented promise, BNP Paribas Fortis has further expanded an even-more personal interaction based on clear attentiveness, optimal data management, and personalized, dynamic services.
The bank has built a marketing data warehouse where it centralizes all information about its clients. This is connected with an operational database with the various channels to enable BNB Paribas Fortis to “listen” to its customers and to act in real time. Selligent helps greatly with this interaction in the direct channels. The tool takes care of the distribution of segmented newsletters. But even more interesting is that the target groups are not divided according to a segmenting model. Instead, the bank distinguishes between what the client personally indicates as being interesting and has now expanded that behavioral profile to better customize its approach in its direct channels.
The bank has focused on the integration of Marigold Engage within its current infrastructure. This allows it to trace consumers both in public and in the registered environment and to offer them dynamic content aimed at their specific activities and needs.
The increased focus on customers also means that possibilities for direct contact in the different offices and branches of the bank are maintained and even further built out. Next to the virtual environment and its direct contact possibilities, the local bank manager plays a crucial role in guaranteeing authenticity and personal human interaction, with this role becoming more important than ever. This personal relationship is pulled through to the digital environment, so that, for example, the client can also address his advisor in his personal online banking environment.
An ongoing challenge for the bank is to further expand and customize all the channels to interact with the individual client. Key to the success of this is maintaining a consistent, human, and multi-channel service approach that breaks down all borders between “physical” and “virtual” interactions, thus ensuring optimal customer value.
The role of Marigold Engage as an important partner will continue. Selligent has proven to be a partner that’s in line with the bank’s strategy and able to provide a great deal of experience and knowledge when it comes to customer interaction, among other areas. Selligent has helped the bank to develop and maintain a new approach, utilizing new tools to provide unmatched customer service. In this win-win situation, BNP Paribas Fortis benefits from a wonderful client database with a wealth of (often transactional) contacts in a high-security environment.
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