How can financial institutions drive digital adoption and enhance customer engagement in an increasingly online world? In this insightful conversation, Ade Crossland, Digital Skills Leader at Nationwide Building Society, provides a behind-the-scenes look at their innovative approach. A collaboration with Inbenta and our interactive Learn technology led to the creation of Discover Digital, a solution that has transformed Nationwide’s digital landscape. From addressing initial challenges to celebrating recent industry recognition, this discussion between Ade and Ashtad Pouredehi, VP of Client Success North America at Inbenta, offers a glimpse into the future of digital banking and customer service.
The following is an edited transcript of their conversation. Watch the full webinar below:
What was the initial challenge that led you to bring Inbenta on board?
We need to go back about seven years to 2017. At that time, our digital channels were just beginning to emerge. And back then we didn’t have a platform to promote digital awareness of our cash machines or the mobile app, for example. We had no way of starting a conversation about our new digital services. So back then, in 2017, our goal was to create a tool that would enable us to build customer awareness of our digital channels.
But we also wanted a solution that increased the digital knowledge and skills of our people, enabling them to have confidence to hold informed and valuable conversations with our customers about all things digital.
So we took the Inbenta simulator solution and created Discover Digital. For colleagues, it’s all about helping them to have memorable digital conversations with our customers. And for customers, it’s about providing confidence to explore and use our digital channels and really to provide opportunities to do their banking with us in a way that’s timely and convenient to them.
But this project wasn’t a one-off seven years ago. It’s become a long-term strategic plan that enables us to grow our digital capability. It’s a multi-layered solution right across the business. It’s become the business driver that enables digital conversations and that results in digital adoption and the growth of our digital channels, and it’s the key tool for our frontline colleagues to be able to demonstrate and advocate our digital service options. It’s also a great way to simplify our processes and really make Nationwide accessible and easy to do business with.
And the benefits have been an absolute game-changer.
When you can show somebody how to perform an action online, that really helps to remove all the barriers of fear. It also reduces the anxiety of complicated processes and the apprehension of safety and security concerns. But above all, it’s about providing choice and opportunity and creating that value in terms of our customer relationships.
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How do you use Learn across your different platforms?
We use Discover Digital in three unique ways, and it’s made-up of three easy-to-use websites.
The first one is a public-facing site that’s accessible to everybody and incorporates over 65 of our digital demos, videos and learning modules. We’ve got an interactive library made up of different channels and categories. For example, our demos are grouped by what a customer can do on the mobile app or on the internet bank or what they can do by using our cash machines or via our website.
We’ve recently included a channel called Digital Skills, and this is a new addition that provides learning to our customers, not just about the process of how to transact online, but as a way of encouraging the development of their digital life skills. As a mutual organization owned and run by our members, we really want to do our bit to have a positive impact on the broader society, and Digital Skills is a great way of demonstrating that, helping our customers learn how new technology works and giving them an opportunity to take their first steps into adopting a much more digital lifestyle.
So 68% of customers find our demos helpful or very helpful at explaining the online process. And 85% of them say that they’ll go on to transact online as a result of using the demo. Those are some really positive scores in terms of engagement.
The second website is colleague-facing. It’s a copy of the public site but it comes with a number of additional features that allows our frontline colleagues to have great digital conversations with our customers. Our colleagues are able to bookmark favorite demos — all the ones perhaps that they use most often, so they’re quickly accessible — to have those conversations with customers either at the counter, in a private space, or perhaps in a relaxed atmosphere over a coffee. Colleagues can walk through demos side-by-side with our customers, either in branch or one-to-one on the telephone. And that really helps to build trust and confidence so the customer can see the journey as it progresses and they can pause, they can ask questions, and get a feel of the process in a safe environment before having a go online themselves. Frontline colleagues can also share demos directly with our customers via email. You just click on the envelope icon, stick in the customer’s name and their email address, and send the demo directly to the customer’s inbox.
The third site is our colleague-training site. This is where colleagues are able to learn all about the features and benefits of transacting online and get to know each digital journey for themselves. A great feature of this site is the ability for colleagues to subscribe to the website, and by doing that they get notified by email every time we upload new learning content or make a change to an existing process. And in that way, we’re ensuring that they are always fully up to speed with any technical or process-related change and can have those fully informed conversations with our customers about the latest developments.
The training site is made up of different learning modules, with courses related to all types of banking topics: credit card, savings and so on. The site allows our colleagues to build up their knowledge at a pace that’s suitable for them, and all of the learning content is incentivized by the opportunity to earn awards and badges. There are team league tables that generate some healthy competition between colleagues, and the website is supported by a discussion forum and a news feed.
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Can you share any data on how the three sites are being used?
Discover Digital is an absolutely hugely trusted site amongst both our colleagues and our customers.
Our most popular demos are all associated with becoming digitally active, like how to register for digital banking, how to download the mobile app, or how to view statements and transactions.
Our colleagues share demos via email around 11,000 times per week, and we get in the region of 12,000 public views per week via links and referrals from our website and our chatbot. Our frontline colleagues really engage with customers and use the tool to explain our digital processes.
On average, they have around 6,000 side-by-side conversations per week, either in the branch or on the telephone through our contact centres. The training site is also really well-used — I believe it’s in the region of about 1,000 training courses completed each week.
We can point to some really good colleague satisfaction scores as well. When we last did a survey, around 80% of colleagues said they felt really comfortable using the tool and really appreciated its use. And there’s also a really strong colleague Net Promoter Score of 88% in that they recommend it to their other colleagues to use.
Is there a particular success story that shows how Discover Digital has had a positive impact on your customers and employees?
Yes, absolutely. I’ve got a lovely example that I can share with you. In the UK, we have a financial product called an Individual Savings Account or ISA, and these accounts allow you to save up to 20,000 pounds each year and receive tax-free interest. The product has a particular quirk in that, if a customer doesn’t credit their ISA during the year, the account must go through a renewal process before any more funds can be deposited.
Towards the end of each tax year, this generated a high volume of contact demand across our telephony and branch channels, with customers asking questions about why funds couldn’t be paid into accounts to allow them to take advantage of their full savings allowance before the end of the tax year.
So we used Discover Digital to create a step-by-step demo, which we overlaid with advice on each of the particular steps, providing some rich contextual information about the process and how it would unlock the account to accept additional funds ahead of the new tax year.
We first shared the demo with our frontline teams via internal comms. That enabled colleagues to learn how customers could self-serve and renew their ISA account online. And then, as ISA renewal season approached, we launched the demo to customers through social media and embedded the demo into our website journey.
In the first week alone, the demo was viewed by over 12,000 customers, and our frontline colleagues shared the demo in excess of 19,000 times, which resulted in fewer contacts, a saving in operational costs, but, most importantly, a much smoother, more informed and easier ISA season for both our customers and our colleagues.
The impact was so significant that, in partnership with our friends at Inbenta, we entered the ISA season case study as an example of customer engagement in this year’s PAY360 payment industry awards. These awards celebrate innovation and collaboration by recognizing companies that have made significant advances in how we pay today. We were delighted to jointly win the 2024 award for Best Customer Engagement Programme in collaboration with our partners at Inbenta, which allowed us to celebrate our great working relationship.
