#LEAwards 2020 highlight: How DBS transitioned from banking to lifestyle app

The DBS Lifestyle App is a result of DBS Bank’s digital strategy to embrace technology and re-imagine the customer journey - and it has done so brilliantly. At this year Loyalty and Engagement Awards, DBS took home two golds in Best use of Mobile and Best use of Technology categories. It also took home two silvers for Best Loyalty Programme – Launch/Re-launch and Best use of UI/UX Design. The bank took home the bronze for Best Card-Based Loyalty programme.

Our incumbent Overall Winner's omnichannel customer journey engages customers through an interactive experience that allows them to enjoy a range of benefits tailored to their banking needs.

Challenge

The business team first studied the customers’ needs through surveys and focus groups and identified the different card usage services that customers require. The bank then developed innovative solutions with in-house technology and project delivery teams.

The DBS Lifestyle app team also collaborated with its in-house data science team to develop a unique algorithm to apply recommendation models to each customer group to ensure that relevant content and offers were served to the customers.

The key objective is to offer personalisation, create unique customer experience and shorten the time needed to perform a certain task.

• Personalised offer – based on the ‘next best offer’ recommendation model;  
• Personalised goal – transparency and clearly defined goals based on customers past engagement;  
• Personalised tracking – ease of engagement.

The key objective was to offer personalisation on the mobile app (DBS Lifestyle App), create unique customer experience and shorten the time users take to perform a certain task. This was intended to help with app visibility, optimise user acquisition and increase card usage.

Strategy

 Through its data analytic studies, DBS identified these customers’ needs:

• Enable customer to have easy access to information at their fingertips (i.e. customers can track their credit card due date and even set a reminder for bill payments so that they will never have to worry about forgetting when their bill is due);
• Receive personalised offers that are relevant to customers (using recommander engine);
• Eliminate pain points of participating in bank promotions (with spend progress tracking and instant rewards fulfilment);
• Help customers to organise their expenses, break down spending by category, and makes it easy to track transactions at a glance;
• Enable flexibility and convenience for customers to use their DBS points / POSB Daily$ to offset recent purchases anywhere, anytime. 

With its understanding of customers, these features were then built as functionalities into the DBS Lifestyle App to address customers’ needs and create improved customer experience (with engaging content and user-friendly interfaces). Secure and convenient login methods were embedded to allow customers to access all card services quickly, and customers could log in to the DBS Lifestyle App using their DBS login credentials to allow a seamless onboarding experience.

Other enhanced card features to better customers’ banking experience includes:

• Bill payment alerts – allow customers to set reminders so that they will never be late for their card payment again.
  
  
• Expenses tracker – allow customers to get a detailed breakdown of their credit card expenses by month and category, so that they can learn their spending habits better and save more along the way.
  
  
• Transaction history – allow customer to view credit card available limit, DBS Points / POSB Daily$ and their card spending history easily.

The auto-activation magstripe also used customers’ locations to automatically turn on the overseas magstripe when they leave Singapore and turn it back off when they are back at home, providing users with greater peace of mind and added security for future card transactions.

Meanwhile, advanced machine learning models deployed allowed the bank to make personalised offers relevant for the customer, and personalised deals are recommended for each customer in the “Deals for You” page.

Execution

DBS rolled out series of contextual engagement campaigns to better the customer experience, activate MCC extension and drive spend lift. The engagement campaigns were specially curated based on customer spending pattern and demographics.  With DBS Lifestyle App, the bank is now able to issue contextual mobile coupons to selected customers via DBS Lifestyle app for them to utilise at participating merchants.

DBS also capitalised customer spend propensity data and contextually engage them via ATL and BTL communications such as DBS/POSB website, eDM and App-Push Notification, Digital channels – Facebook/Instagram/Google, TheSmartLocal.com video/editorial, Golden Village media channels.

Leveraging on the wealth of big data that the bank has, the personalised spend goals made the campaign relevant for every customer. For instance, a low spender is given a low spend goal and they will not be expected to meet unachievable targets. Top spenders are rewarded with better prizes that makes their spend worthwhile. This helps the bank better optimise incentives, tailored to customers’ spend behaviors. Upon meeting the spend goal, customers will also get to play a simple game to redeem their reward.

Results

Apps are now an integral part of our daily micro-moments and the DBS Lifestyle App has definitely been a powerful tool for DBS and helped the bank built a deeper relationship with customers.

It has helped the bank create a strong proposition to differentiate itself from other similar apps in the industry by providing a personalised experience for each individual customer throughout the entire customer journey. This was validated through its increase in downloads, monthly average active rate, credit and debit spend and others.

The bank also looks to engage customers contextually by leveraging on a unique algorithm (collaborative filtering and look-a-like model) to cull leads by spend propensity. This has helped it to achieve business goals to identify new potential customers that share similar spending patterns with customer of a specific segment which gives us massive improvement in customer engagement.

DBS Lifestyle App has also helped the DBS team to increase productivity by automating processes through a self-managed content management platform, allowing DBS team to focus on business related responsibilities, resulting in the organisation becoming productive, producing better outcomes and results over time. With the detailed reporting functionality, it allows the DBS team to spot early trends in activity and adjust the prize inventory and rate of incentives to ensure optimal user engagement with controlled liability. The team is also able to optimise marketing investment with the ability to increase registration cap based on participation rate.

Overall it saw success in

• Effective use of contextual and consistent targeting.
• Greater customer engagement with personalised spend goals to drive incremental sales.
• Five times better campaign response rate and higher fulfilment rate (traditional vs Lifestyle campaigns).
• Effective channel to activate inactive/low spenders.
• Drive card spend with effective customer engagement through contextual marketing.
• Cross-selling of relevant products to increase product holdings.
• Lower cost for operation with instant fulfilment.
• Lower the cost to serve with self-serve services (reduction of calls to call centre team).

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