ANZ Simplification Programme - Guiding Customers Through Massive Change

With the resolve to become new Zealand’s best bank, ANZ National Bank decided to bring the best of both ANZ and the National Bank together under one brand as part of its Simplification project.

From a marketing perspective this meant dealing with 2 mammoth challenges affecting 2.4million customers:
1)    How to inform all ANZ customers that they were moving onto a new product set, while dealing with an unstable data warehouse environment that was fragmented, product focussed and had data accuracy challenges
2)    How to explain to National Bank customers that changing from one of the most respected to one of the least considered banking brands was a good idea

The project required a bank wide customer relationship marketing approach to manage customers  - especially our High Value at Risk segment - through a volatile period of change. However with no existing customer centric data available the bank needed to build from scratch:
•    A database that provided a single customer view across all business units and both brands, supported customer analysis, the production of message matrices, mail files, and fed customer data into a frontline support tool.
•    A modelling tool that allowed us to protect High Value customers and proactively manage potential customer defection throughout the period of change.

Other critical success factors of the programme were:
A data driven communication approach at customer level, a unique testing methodology for large scale letter proofing, a bank wide strategy, integrating customer comms with front line support activity.

The results of the programme have exceeded expectations. Call volumes and complaints volumes were well below double digit forecasts. Active consideration of ANZ improved from 31% to 41% amongst National Bank customers - and what’s more, the opinion that ANZ is a brand on its way up nearly tripled. Unexpectedly, ANZ's share of sales actually increased  by 2%!