Start-up Consumer Finance Company
Moving from upstart to market player can come with growing pains. Ippon created the tools which allowed our client to quickly craft new messaging campaigns, provide new modes of communication, and the integrations to gain insight into these customer interactions. They have been able to move off byzantine custom solutions that won’t scale to an orchestrated, flexible, and automated communications platform with analytics at its core.
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Developing a Bank Omni-Channel Communications Platform - Enabling Flexibility and Intelligence
A Challenger Bank helping everyone have access to fair and clear credit launched as a stand-alone company in 2018. They have reached 1.5 million accounts and continue to grow. In 2020, the company experienced more than 100% revenue growth and is on pace to double revenue growth again in 2021. The key to their success has been the ability to scale through innovation.
Customer Challenge
Our client needed to move from their legacy, custom-coded email campaigns and workflow to a robust enterprise platform. The processes that were initially built as a startup were no longer scalable for their growing customer base. The position they were in was untenable for the reliability and transparency needed in fulfillment, and they needed insight into the customer interactions that are required to be a capable contender in the market. The client needed to develop a digital communications system that could deliver the right message to the right people at the right time.
There were a number of constraints with the existing solution, such as:
- A tedious and time-consuming process for editing, previewing, reviewing, and launching changes
- Difficulty managing customer segmentation
- Limited customer insight and impact assessment (no A/B Testing)
- Heavy reliance on engineering time to bring campaigns to market
An additional challenge was the fact that this bank was going through a major core processor migration with a fixed deadline, a total overhaul of the company’s internal systems, all while launching several new ventures. This meant evolving infrastructure, data patterns, rigorous prioritization, and dependencies.
THE SOLUTION
In addition to building the communications and analytics base platform, we were also able to integrate several new products with marketing campaigns into the platform and support critical conversion needs outside of the communications infrastructure. This was all done while working directly with business owners within the company to prioritize features, refactor, and migrate existing campaigns.
We improved message tracking, access, and monitoring by centrally managing agent-facing information across multiple sources such as Zendesk tickets, Fulfillment, and Customer Authentication Events. This was accomplished by services managing and serving streaming data, in addition to internal and external facing APIs from various vendors.
Customer data and analytics are an integral component we integrated within the messaging system using Segment, which allows us to track messages and customer interactions across messaging and web allowing the client to build true customer personas. Segment, along with our messaging platform provides the capability to handle both real-time messaging events from microservices, as well as batch-oriented jobs from file loads.
Ippon remains focused with our client on continuous improvement / continuous delivery as we move towards adding additional channels and capabilities which can be centrally orchestrated and managed through the platform. We look to expand beyond digital messaging by bringing in additional processes, such as document management and mail fulfillment.
Core Objectives and Key Results
With this project, we were able to increase speed to market for new customer communications, reduce engineering time and cost, and improve operational efficiency and reliability.
New campaigns and communications can now be launched in one day, and in most circumstances, without any engineering resources. Previously, new communications would take 3-4 weeks, and require engineering assistance from start to finish. Now new customer and content data can be added within hours instead of weeks and there is guaranteed delivery of customer messaging and real-time monitoring and alerting, including data retention and replay capabilities for resiliency.
As traditional communication channels become less effective and customer expectations have evolved, it is imperative that companies have an easy way to build and send personalized communications to customers in the channel of their choice. If your company is looking to innovate in this value stream, Ippon is here to help from start to finish.