How TSB enhances customer experience while reducing overhead costs
The Challenge
TSB Bank sought to enhance operational efficiency by optimizing the customer experience, harnessing the power of AI for actionable insights about customers' experience with the brand, and establishing a unified view of social advertising for comprehensive marketing insights.
TSB is a retail bank that offers full-service banking to more than five million customers in the United Kingdom. It’s a well-known and trusted brand in the U.K., with a heritage that stretches back to the start of the savings bank movement some 200 years ago.
Today, TSB serves customers in person, over the phone, and through digital channels as it brings its entire customer experience management ecosystem onto a single, unified platform. When Ravi Mitra joined TSB as social media manager and operations manager, he used the bank’s growth strategy as a guiding force for his work, focusing on serving customers — and innovating to serve them even better. With this in mind, Ravi turned his attention to three key areas:
- Create a best-in-class customer service experience while reducing overhead costs by enabling agents to work more efficiently
- Harness the power of AI to glean deep, actionable insights about customers’ experiences with the brand
- Create a unified view of paid, owned, and earned advertising to unlock full-funnel, actionable insights for the marketing team
The Solution
With Sprinklr's unified customer experience management (Unified-CXM) platform implemented, the bank would innovate to further elevate the customer experience and maximize brand value.
The thing I enjoy the most about the Sprinklr platform is that it’s coupled with that AI engine that runs through the entire product suite. It’s empowering. And when you combine Advertising with Listening and Care, you get that 360-degree platform for customer experience management.”
Social Media Manager, TSB Bank
When Ravi arrived at TSB, the bank had already unified its customer experience management technology onto one platform, implementing all four of Sprinklr’s product suites: Sprinklr Social, Sprinklr Insights, Sprinklr Service and Sprinklr Marketing. Ravi’s goal was to support TSB’s growth strategy by innovating on the Sprinklr platform to further elevate the customer experience and drive even more value for the brand.
Create best-in-class customer service while reducing overhead costs
Like all businesses, TSB has experienced an explosion of customer contact volume on social channels, like X, formerly Twitter and Facebook Messenger, as customer expectations for speedy resolutions rise. This puts a lot of pressure on customer service agents to meet those expectations. With the Sprinklr Service product suite, TSB is able to ease that pressure and enable happier, more efficient agents with a single, omnichannel care console. Agents save time using macros — or quick actions — to perform repetitive tasks with a slick click or keystroke. Custom macros and rules also allow them to easily handle spikes in customer inquiries by enabling them to reach customers when they need it most, quickly and accurately.
“Previously, handling a sudden influx of cases would have taken hours. We would have had to call for backup agents,” says Ravi. “Now, we’re able to handle huge spikes in customer inquiries with the same number of agents — or fewer.”
TSB has further enabled agents with Sprinklr AI features, like automated routing, which uses AI to automatically classify messages as engageable or non-engageable. Engageable messages are then routed to agents, enabling them to focus on the conversations that matter most. Agents work even more efficiently with AI-powered Smart Responses, which provide them with responses that are known to garner positive customer reactions. This ensures a consistent brand experience from agent to agent and reduces the need for agents to memorize best practices or write responses from scratch.
Better serve customers by understanding their experience with the brand
Ravi and the team implemented Social Listening from Sprinklr Insights to listen to the real-time voice of TSB customers across social channels. That data is then transformed into actionable, relevant insights that drive business growth and evolve customer experiences. His team gains further insight by leveraging Competitive Benchmarking to analyze social post performance against competitors. This helps TSB to understand how its messages stack up to content from other best-in-class brands — and to get a sense of how its own campaigns are being received.
TSB leverages these same AI-powered capabilities for a more advanced use case: to analyze first-party data, like customer surveys. In the past, the bank pulled survey responses from as many as 30,000 customers into spreadsheets, then hired agencies to analyze the data. Now, it uses Sprinklr Insights solution to ingest first-party data for survey responses, group them by theme in a dashboard, and share actionable takeaways with the customer operations team.
“Banks have so much data, but it’s often quite time- and labor-intensive to draw actionable insights from it,” says Ravi. “Using Sprinklr’s AI capabilities to analyze that data is a game-changer and has huge cost-saving for TSB.”
Empower employees to amplify positive brand messaging
For many companies, employees are their most vocal and knowledgeable brand advocates. But for banks especially, it can be difficult to know how best to tap this resource in a way that is safe for the brand and compliant with industry regulations. As a result, companies may tightly restrict how their employees engage on social media. TSB, however, went another direction: it implemented Employee Advocacy from Sprinklr’s Sprinklr Social product suite to empower its employees to use their voices — and social channels — to amplify brand messaging. With Advocacy, the social team curates a library of positive, reusable, and brand-approved content that employees can easily share out on their own social channels — and leverages the power of their social influence for the good of the brand.
Unlock full-funnel, actionable insights with a unified view of all advertising
TSB also implemented Social Advertising from Sprinklr Marketing to help maximize return on ad spend while minimizing risk to the business with enterprise-grade governance. Internal teams and agency partners now work on one unified platform to coordinate social advertising campaigns across channels.
They use Sprinklr’s AI-powered Smart Bidding feature to ascertain the ideal bid strategy to deploy across channels in order to gain maximum efficiency for advertising campaigns. In this way, they’re able to identify the lowest bid amount required to meet pacing goals. Automated, compliant workflows then enable them to push these paid campaigns to multiple channels and easily measure the impact.
With the addition of Marketing Analytics, TSB teams have one comprehensive, consolidated view of all marketing campaigns, including social, web, and email, allowing them to connect the dots across channels. They save time and get instant results through automated report creation and real-time insights for optimization. Unified reporting with cross-channel insights enables them to make more informed marketing decisions and improve their advertising performance.
“Reporting on paid, owned, and earned social content has always been disjointed across the various channels,” says Ravi. “But I feel like Sprinklr has found the perfect way to display all three in one place for that truly unified analytics dashboard, so we can really get those deep insights.”
The Outcome
TSB estimates that improved workflow efficiencies, thanks to Sprinklr Service, now save its agents more than a thousand hours per year. Customers now receive responses faster than ever, as the bank’s average first response SLA has improved by 86% — from two hours 25 minutes to 20 minutes nine seconds.
TSB has also made huge gains in social media reach and engagement with Employee Advocacy. In FY22, employees combined their social power to reach more than 1.2 million users on LinkedIn, generating more than 16,700 engagements on the channel, and realizing nearly $240,000 (£195,000) in earned media value.
Finally, Sprinklr Marketing is enabling internal teams and agency partners to coordinate campaigns across channels and easily measure their impact. Using Smart Bidding for 30% of its campaigns in FY22, TSB saved an estimated $40,000 (£32,000), with many campaigns realizing more than 10% savings. Unified reporting, rather than accessing data natively, saved teams an estimated 2,500 hours.