Sparbank – The Pension Check

Sparbank’s Pension Check used resources effectively and achieved great ROI

Challenge
How can we create proactive sales in a market that is almost saturated? Sparbank competes against all the other traditional banks and pension funds, so the challenge was to shift the focus to more emotional parameters, e.g. the relationship and the individual consideration. It is essential to be able to meet customers with understanding and individual consideration in an advice and sales situation, but at the same time it is extremely resource demanding.

Strategy
As an alternative to the personal bank adviser, we created a digitalized "Sales Force 2", which intelligently leads the customer through the process as only the best adviser could. It is, in other words, automated advice in a dialogue with the customer that leads to sale. The annual Pension Check gave a natural opportunity to begin the dialogue. Required information about both existing and potential customers was collected and used in a way that customers found relevant and was more effective for Sparbank’s advisers. In addition to that:

• An online tool was invented for the branch offices that gave the advisers the opportunity to qualify their knowledge about their target group
• We introduced an automated measurement of "readiness" that gave the advisers the ability to easily retrieve information about potential customers and book a meeting through the online "lead administrative website"
• We worked with integrating communication so mass communication became a part of creating involvement in the dialogue between potential Sparbank customers
• We used the metaphor about "thinking in the box" to clarify the message

Results

• The pension balance ended at index 167 compared to an expectation of index 100
• The DM design resulted in a 40% higher response rate than traditional letter design
• The response rate among existing customers was index 117