Ageas and R-cubed
Evolved from standalone campaigns to automated multi-channel campaigns
Background
Ageas is an international insurer with major markets in Europe and Asia and can trace its roots back to 1824. Today, as one of the largest car and home insurers in the UK, Ageas is proud to be protecting around five million UK customers. Making insurance easy for customers is what Ageas is all about.
Ageas’ growth has involved moving with generational differences in its brands and has meant that they must constantly push the boundaries, to respond to what matters to the customer at each point in the customer journey. By staying hyper-relevant and evolving alongside the changing expectations of all its customers Ageas is retaining its competitive edge. Over the past 3 years, Ageas has worked hard to become a more customer-centric organisation and has invested in technological innovations, to deliver the best customer service and to drive valuable and engaging two-way conversations with customers.
This approach is building a stronger rapport with customers, more active engagement with marketing communications and, in turn, is demonstrably improving customer loyalty – which is remarkable in this competitive market where customers are more prone to shopping around.
Ageas challenged themselves to reinvent their customer journeys and maintain relevant customer contact throughout the year to increase retention; responding to what matters to each individual at every point in their journey. So, shaped by customer research, Ageas created a sophisticated ‘Surprise and Delight’ brand engagement programme.
At the start of the programme, Ageas was faced with an incomplete, out-of-date view of customers and a slow, manual marketing communications process. Ageas embarked on a major overhaul of its marketing database – to supercharge its communications.
The Apteco Solution
The goal was to improve brand recognition through focused email and SMS communications that educate, inform and ‘surprise and delight’ customers so they become trusting brand advocates and drive greater commercial value. Ageas realised that to deliver the level of personalisation and automation required, a step-change in campaign execution was needed. The Apteco Marketing Suite sat at the heart of the marketing transformation: • FastStats provided a state-of-art superstore of real-time customer insight • PeopleStage realised the vision of intelligent automated one-to-one customer contact into a reality of relevant, timely, effective communications
In the initial stage an in-depth understanding of the customer journeys was needed. Using FastStats, the team mapped out the purchase cycles of different customer segments and the existing transactional and non-transactional communications identifying clear patterns.
As a result, Ageas was able to identify gaps in communications or times when too many communications were going out. Ageas also carried out key customer research to understand customer areas of interest, optimal frequencies and channel preferences across different customer groups and brands.
By arming PeopleStage with an in-depth understanding of customers, Ageas was able to create a suite of dynamic automated campaigns sending relevant, personalised communications daily on different devices, and across multiple channels. This automated capability empowered Ageas with the required step-change in their multi-channel communications.
Ageas’ PeopleStage implementation has become a central hub for Ageas where a single source of multi-channel marketing activity can be controlled, measured and reported on.
Jo Young, Director, R-cubed
Jo Young, Director, R-cubed
The impact on the business
The Surprise and Delight Brand Engagement programme has a clear objective to increase customer retention and brand advocacy. Ageas are now delivering fully automated, multi-content campaigns integrated with new website design and aligned with search content campaigns. The campaigns have grown from four campaigns a few years ago to well over 40 campaigns. This would not have been possible without an enhanced single customer view within FastStats and a new supercharged Peoplestage set-up. R-cubed and Ageas plan to undertake further improvements to the Brand Engagement programme particularly to include the results from the latest customer research and based on the latest commercial results.
The results are showing a huge potential for additional personalisation and triggering of relevant messaging, to further help increase brand advocacy and retention.
Ageas has been able to evolve from standalone campaigns to automated multi-channel campaigns that follow seasonal, policy and personal customer journeys.
Apteco FastStats provided a state-of-art superstore of real-time customer insight, critically providing a 360 degree view of customers.
As well as providing an understanding of the content to consider, the latest insight has given a steer on the frequency of contact and the style, format and length of emails that were working best.
Using Apteco has enabled our brand engagement activity to grow in scale, approach and ambition.
Graham Davis, Head of Marketing Strategy and Insight, Ageas
Graham Davis, Head of Marketing Strategy and Insight, Ageas