ANZ Simplification Programme - Customer Transition Communications

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.

This meant migrating 1.2 million ANZ customers to a new technology system, and changes to all their banking products and services. The challenge was to communicate those changes to every single ANZ customer in a personalised way – with no margin for error and within an unstable data warehouse environment that was fragmented, product-focussed and had several data accuracy challenges.

The project required a bank-wide customer relationship marketing approach to manage customers through a volatile period of change. However with no existing customer-centric data available, the bank needed to build from scratch a database that not only provided a single customer view across all business units, but also supported customer analysis, the production of message matrices and mail files, and enabled customer data to be fed into a frontline support tool. It also required the development of a unique large-scale testing methodology to ensure there were no errors.

It was the largest, most complex project of its type ever undertaken in New Zealand – and it had to be delivered in just 7 months with minimum resources.

Under considerable pressure, the project exceeded expectations. 73,000 letter variations were mailed to 1.2 million customers, with no customer complaints received and call volumes well below forecast. Research confirmed customers had all the information they needed to support them through the changes. The approach was so successful it is now being used as a model for other programmes within the bank.