RCBC powers smarter, more personal customer engagement with Salesforce

Rizal Commercial Banking Corporation (RCBC) is the financial flagship company of the Yuchengco Group of Companies (YGC), one of the oldest and largest conglomerates in the Philippines. The bank is amongst the country's top largest private domestic banks in terms of assets and it has won multiple awards for its digital banking services.

The pandemic accelerated RCBC’s already on-going digital innovation to be able to continue to service its clients despite strict lockdown restrictions. The bank went through a holistic digital transformation - using Salesforce to help automate and digitise its internal processes, marketing and customer engagement.

RCBC’s ongoing transformation cuts across the entire Bank in which multiple teams across businesses and control units are deeply involved. Together, these teams redefine how the bank connects with its customers and achieve remarkable efficiencies along the way.

The ultimate objective of the SME Banking Group (SMEBG) to deliver the best customer experience required a strategy where its own transformation became an imperative. To serve its customers in the best possible way, SMEBG implemented internal changes by way of digitisation.

Manual processes were streamlined and duplication of effort eliminated through automated workflows. Aspiring to be the best SME bank meant delivering the best customer experience, by optimising processes for faster turnaround time.

SMEBG’s "SME Transformed" project began a year before the onset of the pandemic. The transformation involved integrating changes in processes, spearheading innovation in technology, and ensuring alignment of everyone involved in the engagement and implementation. This led to the decision to utilise Sales Cloud and automate lending processes from end-to-end.

SMEBG was quick to adopt a modern space planning method anchored on a plug-and-play concept that equipped all relationship managers with laptops and VPN access. This set-up also enabled ease in tracking of sales productivity and balance in work distribution, all made possible through dashboards provided to team leaders.

“We realised that we needed to change internally, that was the only way for us to ultimately offer a digital experience to our clients. By proactively taking on this transformation project, we became one step ahead in responding to the pandemic,” said Kristina Davila, Head of Business Development Division of the SMEBG. “Our relationship managers were equipped to work from home and team leaders had increased visibility into their activities."

Following the completion of the first phase of its transformation, SMEBG simplified its manual end-to-end process by an estimated 50 percent. An auto-credit investigation (CI) capability is now in place, resulting from the integration between Sales Cloud and third party bureaus, which reduced the CI turnaround time from one day to only four hours. With the credit checking process streamlined, total turnaround time was reduced to as fast as two weeks.

Part of the transformation is the use of data analytics to understand lead behaviour, strategise for growth and further increase conversions. With Sales Cloud in place, SMEBG looks forward to scaling up its leads generation and account processing.

With more enhancements underway, the RCBC transformation model is envisioned to provide a 360-degree view of SME customer requirements. This would allow better understanding of customers’ needs and provide customised solutions. The team is now focused on integrating all the relevant banking systems to deliver a seamless customer experience which include onboarding through online application, loans processing with the ease of document submission, and management of account including loan payments. Through the use of a single dashboard, clients gain access to all RCBC products, and business solutions.

SMEBG is in collaboration with the Marketing Group, which is well positioned to support these efforts as it makes great strides in its own transformation.

In the past, RCBC cast a wide net with its marketing efforts rather than customising campaigns. However, the challenges of the pandemic led to a need for greater personalisation. In addition, RCBC wanted to better reach customers across YGC to grow its existing customer base.

“Each customers’ needs are different which means there is no one way to service them. Instead, we need to match each customer with the right products and approach them in the right way,” said Alexis Villafuerte, Head of the Digital Consumer Engagement Department, Marketing Group at RCBC. “Salesforce helps us understand our customers and communicate with them more personally which gives us a clear advantage. This is especially important in The Philippines where there is so much competition in banking.”

To achieve its goals, RCBC needed to stop doing things manually. It also decided to implement Marketing Cloud so that it could use its data to power smarter, more targeted marketing.

The Data Science Group played a key role in this decision. Multiple team members had used Marketing Cloud in the past and knew the potential of the platform. They were able to conduct internal training and work alongside the marketing team to build and optimise customer journeys. This training and support together with the use of Trailhead has helped many individuals within the team to build and sharpen their digital marketing skills.

“For us to go digital, we had to change our ways and apply new tools. The great thing about Salesforce is that it allows us to do so much on one platform,” said Arnel de Guzman, VP of Campaigns and Analytics, Data Science Group at RCBC.

In less than a year, RCBC has made significant progress in transforming customer engagement. With Marketing Cloud, the bank was able to harness information like customer transaction history and demographics to establish behavioural patterns which helped build more personalised campaigns and journeys. It also enabled the bank to automate journeys as opposed to scheduling and sending each touch point manually.

“What I really like about Salesforce is that it allows us to create customised and targeted journeys that engage our customers at every touchpoint. Now, we have visibility when customers have opened our email or have connected with us inside a branch. This allows us to prioritise and work on other leads we have yet reached or make follow-through offers to those who have yet to respond,” said Geleen Gutierrez, Smart Customer Acquisition Department Head at RCBC. "This helps us to make the most of our time and optimise our marketing spend."

Gutierrez explained that the ultimate goal of the retail business is to convert more new-to-bank customers. Likewise, the group aims to provide the overall financial needs of its existing clients through effective upsell and cross sell campaigns. Collectively, these efforts supported retail banking to achieve its target. For example, in 2020, campaigns for term deposits contributed to ₱4.5 billion in incremental deposits. Similarly, recent campaigns for checking account have contributed to additional ₱4.4 billion deposits.

“We have such a large pool of customers within the broader conglomerate and we really want to maximise that opportunity. Marketing Cloud supports us by helping us to effectively cross-sell and increase wallet share,” said Gutierrez.

With Marketing Cloud, RCBC is able to do a more targeted approach to digital advertising as well. For example, Villafuerte and her team are able to work with the Data Science Group to identify customers not yet enrolled in online banking. They can then use Advertising Studio to directly target this group on social media.

Campaigns are highly personalised as well with advertising creatives tailored to customers’ interests and factors like new-to-bank or existing clients. The bank can easily track the performance of ads and understand how it contributes to monthly app downloads and enrollments in online banking.

RCBC still regularly reviews top of funnel metrics such as click-through-rates (CTR) and cost-per-click (CPC). These provide early indicators of campaign success other than measure for performance.

Top level results from RCBC’s transformation include ₱773,000 savings from 2020 campaigns alone. This has been achieved through more efficient targeting of emails as well as a reduction in manual effort.

Specific results within the Digital Consumer Engagement Department include a 16.42% click-to-conversion rate on a campaign to encourage enrollments in online banking. This represents a 9.82% increase over the previous campaign which was five months longer and served up 70 million more impressions.

Another campaign was to promote the use of credit and debit cards which resulted in higher and more efficient conversions. Total cost per conversion decreased by 94% while the total volume of card transactions increased by 89%.

The next step for RCBC, in terms of measurement, is to better correlate these results with its different audiences so that it can identify which groups are responsible for the most clicks and conversions. It will then be able to focus on optimising messages for the rest.

“Salesforce continues to help us scale our marketing while finding new efficiencies and delivering better results,” said Villafuerte. “It has also helped us move further into the digital space which is now at the core of the banking industry. That’s increasingly where our customers want to interact with us and where we will direct more and more of our efforts.”