Improving Retail Bank Customer Engagement

Business Objective

• A retail bank client sought insights on why certain customers were more engaged with the bank than others.
• Engaged customers were defined as those who opened a checking account, actively used the account, and made use of other bank products and services.
• Unengaged customers were defined as those who opened a checking account, had minimal deposit or withdrawal activity tied to their account, and typically did not use other bank products or services.

The Challenge

• As part of this study about understanding customer behavior, the client wanted to categorize its customers by key demographics and regions.
• To best understand each customer’s situation and learn what actions could encourage engagement, the bank needed rich verbatims – an important part of the research.

Our Approach

• To gather the robust perspective that the bank client needed, the Schmidt team recommended a quant/qual approach to gather customer insights. The approach included:
  • An online survey that gathered the metrics necessary to understand the engaged and unengaged customer groups better.
  • Phone interviews conducted with 50 engaged and 50 unengaged customers.

• Through this approach, the qualitative team gained a deeper understanding of the behaviors associated with each group as they related to opening accounts and utilization of the bank’s services. These insights would not have been achieved via the online survey alone.