Santander

Santander is a global bank serving customers all over the World and it has a strong foothold in Europe and the Nordics. Read how the bank is using our solution to drive actions that improve NPS, CSat, and the overall experience of customers at different moment of their journey.

Introduction

Santander is the largest bank in Europe by number of customers, it serves over 170 million people and offers them a wide range of banking services. In the Nordic region, Santander Consumer Bank specializes in automotive finance and consumer lending, supporting about 1.5 million customers in Norway, Sweden, Denmark.

The Santander Way is represented with 5 core behaviours, the first of which is Think Customer. Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a key metric for the Santander Consumer Bank team, and it is seen as a driver of both customer and partner engagement, ultimately affecting profit and loss. On top of that, the customer insight team measures Customer Satisfaction (Csat) and collects open feedback at different points of the customer journey – for example at onboarding, after each transaction, and when the customer interacts with the Netbank or the support team.

The Challenge

Manual and sporadic

Before introducing Lumoa (now part of Netigate), Santander Consumer Bank had a much more manual approach to customer feedback, often with differences across different countries.

Once or twice a year, the team used to contact partners, and the feedback was later analyzed. Other surveys were also sent to end-customers, and focus groups were organised when needed. While useful, this process presented a few key problems.

“The process was very manual and at times sporadic”, says Steve Franklin, Chief Commercial Officer at Santander.

The main problem was that the time from actually starting the process to getting information and act on it was quite long. – Steve Franklin, Chief Commercial Officer

Different processes for different countries

“Back then, the process for handling feedback was very different in the different countries”, states Maija Kunttu-Lindblom, Commercial Insights Manager. “In Finland, for example, we were using Questback to send surveys, but the open feedback was analysed in a very manual and time-consuming way, and we were not able to get the most out of what our customers were saying. I see the open feedback as the most valuable tool for us, as it tells us very clearly what we are doing well and what we should be improving in the future.”

For example, Santander sends a survey to internet bank users, and before taking Lumoa into use, product owners were reading each and every comment weekly. There was a lack of a centralised analysis, and so the teams were very dependent on the amount of time product owners could dedicate to this task.

Lack of aggregated data

“Another problem was that we did not have aggregated data about how many customers were raising a certain issue”, continues Maija. “Is this problem a one off or is it affecting a lot of customers, and on top of that how is it impacting the overall experience? We did not have that”.

The problem was intensified when Santander Nordic became a single organisation serving all of the Nordic countries. At that point, it became clear that the team needed to consolidate processes. Also, with hundreds of thousands of feedback per year, it was not possible for anybody to read them and analyse them one by one, that would have been an incredibly time-consuming effort.

The Solution

The marketing and commercial insight teams took it upon themselves to find a solution. “It wasn’t a direction from senior management to go and find a tool”, explains Steve. “It’s often the way that the best ideas and the best things that come up are from passionate people that take the lead”.

Multiple languages and open text analysis

One of the things the team needed to consider were the different languages that customers were using to deliver feedback: Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, Finnish, and of course English. The solution needed to be able to not only manage feedback in different languages, but also to promote the distribution of real customer feedback internally, in a language that staff could understand.

Furthermore, Santander Nordics needed a way to analyse open text feedback at scale, while at the same time seeing what was impacting the customer experience both positively and negatively. And they wanted to be able to not only see and distribute reports, but also to filter results according to different criteria, like country, type of product, customer touch point, and so on.

“For me, the most important thing was the analysis of open text feedback”, explains Maija. “And of course, we needed a tool that made it easy for us to share the insights and the knowledge from our customers throughout the company. With Lumoa, you can have as many users at no additional cost, so it was a great fit for us.”

When I tried Lumoa for the first time, it was illuminating. I didn’t need any training, I was struck by how easy it is. – Steve Franklin, Chief Commercial Officer

“That’s what we are also encouraging people to do”, continues Steve. “You do not need a big training course on it, you instead learn a bit while you do.”

All customer feedback in one place

Now Santander Nordics sends all customer feedback to Lumoa via API integrations with Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Giosg, and other survey and chat tools. Lumoa analyses the feedback and helps the team at Santander to build reports with score development, key topics discussed, and most importantly, what impact different topics have on the most important customer experience metrics. People across the organization can then access the dashboards and take ownership of the insights that are relevant to their work.

“It’s not only the commercial team that looks at customer feedback now”, continues Steve. “The financial control team, for example, reviews the data and presents back to their department, which is excellent. And also from a compliance perspective, the team is digging into Lumoa to see what they can learn from listening to customers”.

The Results

Opening customer feedback to the organization

Santander Nordics now has about 240 people accessing customer feedback directly, from commercial leadership to IT, from customer service to executive management. That’s about one fourth of the organization, and they can now view and act on customer insights, delivering on the bank’s promise to Think Customer.

With the help of Lumoa, Santander noticed that there was a lower NPS score in one specific region, and they created a cross-functional task force to address the problem.

“We looked into Lumoa, and we found and correlated issues that could be raised and packaged into different areas of the business”, explains Steve. “That includes small items – like improving the information on phone queues, so that a customer calling know when they will be connected. And bigger things also, like further investments into the Netbank”.

Lumoa’s open text feedback analysis enables Santander to go beyond a generic, broad categorization of topics, so that issues can be broken down into different actionable items. For example, the task force has been able to identify short term mitigations with improved communication, and at the same time start a process to fix the main issue fully.

Saving time with automated analysis

“Lumoa gives us the ability to listen to our customers on a daily, hourly basis”, says Steve. “You can go into a specific market, or product, identify where scores are higher or lower, get the AI generated summary, and then dig into the details. As a Chief Commercial Officer, I cannot go through thousands and thousands of feedback, but with Lumoa I can also get a sense and good examples of what customers are saying about a specific issue basically in real time”.

With Lumoa, we can analyse big amounts of data from customers, see what we are doing well and what we are not doing well, follow up the developments, and see how our actions impact different customer segments – Maija Kunttu-lindblom, Commercial Insights Manager.

“We have been working with Lumoa for a few years now”, concludes Maija, “and the relationship with our customer success manager is great. The whole Lumoa team is very helpful with the different iterations of our processes. Also, Lumoa is constantly developing the product with new feature, new AI functionalities, and that is brilliant”.