Our recent report, created in partnership with Braze, found that only 53% of financial services brands use advanced techniques like event-based and attribute-based personalisation when it comes to customer communications.
Using modern customer engagement technology will help financial services brands humanise the experience with their customers – as personalising each interaction using sophisticated decisioning algorithms will make the individual feel acknowledged. Real-time customer MarTech can manage two-way dialogue with customers, engaging them with the right content at the right time.
Great experiences start from the first contact
As the market grows ever more competitive and it becomes easier than ever to switch providers, creating the right first impression for your customers is essential.
It’s often thought that successful customer onboarding requires the customer to share a lot of data, but with the right customer strategy, marketing technology and third-party demographic data you can create an onboarding process that’s right for your customer without asking for more than your customer is willing to provide. Registration processes should be simple, not prohibitive to engagement, and show clear reasons for data collection. Consider neo-banks such as Plum who gamify their onboarding journey and make it simple to become a customer.
Collecting marketing consent is an often-neglected part of the sign-up process, with a series of check boxes tucked in at the end just before the terms and conditions acceptance. Improved consent processes are geared towards signing up for specific engaging content or benefits.
Education and transparency
Even though people are visiting branches less, it is still possible to create real trust through educating customers to support their decision making via your digital channels.
Many progressive banking and building society brands are now using interaction and behavioural data to point their customers to educational posts or feature tutorials. Brands can therefore help their customers to meet their individual goals, whether it’s to stay on budget, boost their credit scores, save for a new home, or other major life purchases.
Teaching customers to make the most of the digital tools available to them, and explaining how to achieve their financial goals, will demonstrate care and support. Additionally, being connected with the customer’s long-term ambitions means that bank and consumer are together for the same reason.
Humanising the experience
With Covid-19 accelerating the use of digital channels, the online experience needs to build trust by clearly acting in the customer’s best interests, like an in-branch customer service representative would.
Humanising the experience using empathy is key to this. Creating warmth and understanding around life events, in the same way a customer service representative would, is a powerful way to build that bond with your customer.
It’s critical that the customer journey promotes the value your brand brings by using every interaction, no matter the channel, to reinforce how each individual customer can financially better themselves.
Throughout this blog series for the financial service industry, we are breaking down the opportunities for marketers to create a personalised customer experience, and build brand loyalty through central decisioning engines, marketing attribution models, data modelling, machine learning and AI-driven recommendations. Continue reading at the links below:
For recent insights on how your customers feel about the experience they receive from their financial services providers, and for guidance on how you can better understand and meet shifting customer expectations, download our recent report – Banking on the Customer Journey.
• Bespoke data dashboard and InSite tools
• Acorn geodemographic data for multiple propositions and locations
• Customer and employee profiling to assess community need
• Enabling demand-led growth for genuine customer value
• Rapid report generation to inform many stakeholders
About Bright Horizons
Trusted by families to look after their children for over 30 years, Bright Horizons is an award-winning nursery provider. The company operates over 300 community and workplace nurseries throughout the UK: each is individually designed to serve the needs of its community. Bright Horizons provides tailored childcare for corporate clients and for families, at home, at work and in local settings.
The Challenge
Bright Horizons initially approached CACI for data to support their new site opening and acquisition insight programme. Property Asset Manager Oliver Brookes needed reliable data that was quick and easy to interpret for new site and location decision-making.
Marketing Manager Eddie Thorogood saw a further opportunity to use demographic data to support Bright Horizons’ proposition development and to better understand existing as well as potential catchments.
The Solution
CACI provided Acorn demographics, profiling and mapping, giving insight into specific postcodes and communities. High level demographic maps are instantly visible in InSite’s Locator tool.
Eddie explains: “The blend of data creates reliable and up-to-date information about the demand for our services, to support decision-making about how and where we can expand our operations so we can deliver high quality childcare where it’s needed. It also helps us improve our business model, so we can manage our portfolio and flex and balance our sites to meet changing needs.”
The Benefits
Bright Horizons’ three pillars are ‘people, quality, growth’. Eddie emphasises, “We’re not about just growing for the sake of it. We always want to be where we are needed – where parents can find us and our services will be useful. With this data insight at local level, we can provide a clear picture of community and workplace need to our senior leadership team, so they can sign off new facilities.”
Eddie explains
We have a complex business where everything is audience-centric, so we have multiple offerings. It’s a deeply human business – it’s all about nurturing young children.
The CACI data and dashboard reporting gives us tools to look through every single lens, to understand all the factors that matter to people.
Eddie Thorogood, Marketing Manager, Bright Horizons
The evidence is clear, Covid-19 accelerated the pace of consumers’ changing behaviours.
Our analysis on consumer attitudes towards returning to branches highlighted a 32% reduction in bank branch visits post-covid, with even the most resistant to channel shift turning to apps and websites to manage their finances.
This is against a backdrop of other changes in the UK’s financial services sector that are impacting marketer’s abilities to connect with customers and prospects.
Retaining your savvy savers
Rising interest rates mean that people are becoming incentivised to both start saving again, and to switch savings accounts again, with savvy savers searching for the best deals.
Our recent consumer insights have found that the younger demographic are still expecting to save in the next 12 months. And it is to be expected that your competitors will increase their efforts to attract your savers to their products. You need to be ready to retain them!
Buoyant lending with a shift to the suburbs
Across the UK we saw a shift from the cities to the suburbs, driven by the opportunity to work from home more regularly. A reduced commute and a chance for more space was an opportunity many felt could not be missed.
Coupled with the government provocation of the housing policy, using changes to the stamp duty tax threshold, there has been an incredibly active homebuyer market.
However, recent economic factors have driven up the interest rates available on new mortgages and to those coming to the end of their fixed deals. Consumers are therefore incentivised more than ever to find the best available deal. This becomes a potential flash point for marketers who need to develop trust with customers so that the retention battle can be won.
Insurers need to rethink incentives
New legislation from the FCA means that insurers must be willing to offer the same incentive to new and renewing customers. Past use of aggressive incentives to win new customers’ needs to adapt to regulatory challenges.
Like the other macro conditions, this requires marketers to engage in longer-term marketing journeys with potential consumers, to win them and retain them with value driven propositions.
The need to communicate with the individual
Whichever way you cut it, there’s a lot of change to contend with for the financial services marketer.
From CACI’s perspective, we see there being winners and losers in the market across banking, lending and insurance.
The winners will be those who utilise data and technology to serve customers as individuals. To maintain engaged relationships based on trust and demonstrate how the brand is taking care of the financial interests of the individual.
Throughout our new blog series for the financial service industry (starting with this blog), we will break down the opportunities for marketers to address these challenges through central decisioning engines, marketing attribution models, data modelling, machine learning and AI-driven recommendations. Continue reading at the links below:
For insights on consumer attitudes towards their financial services provider’s marketing and communications, download this report, created by Braze in partnership with CACI. With input from over 200 financial services brands, 1,500 marketing leaders in the financial services industry and 5,000 financial services consumers, the report uncovers a surprising disconnect between what banks think and how customers feel. It also provides guidance for brands in the financial services industry to better understand and meet shifting customer expectations.
As the country learns to live with Covid, CACI’s data and consumer research is revealing what the new normal looks like for the nursery market.
Customer Movement is on the Rise
Let’s start with the positives. Remember just how much more freedom we have than we did this time last year. The contrast between the two maps based on anonymised Mobile App data are stark. The map on the left shows movement activity levels in the last week of March 2021 relative to pre-Covid (Early March 2020) for Central London.
Source: CACI / Digital Envoy
Dark blue shading shows areas that movement levels were way down on pre-pandemic across much of London – not surprising given that restrictions were really only lifted in early April 2021 for all but essential activities (albeit including trips to nurseries). The map on the right is the same week this year, and shows swathes of red across much of London, highlighting that activity and visits to many of these areas has returned to almost pre-Covid levels as we learn to live with life after Covid.
Despite the fact that we are seeing record numbers testing positive for the new variant there is no doubt that many are back out and getting on with their lives after a painful couple of years.
New Behaviours and Attitudes
But we have emerged into a different world. The right-hand map shows that the recovery in movement is not universal. There are still clear areas of blue and lighter red in office dominated parts of the city, and around the major stations of London. The same pattern is seen in cities across our county.
Analysis of the data reveals that our city centres are only now returning to something close to what we would have called normal before the pandemic, and transport hubs are seeing visits about 25% down. But regional towns have grown in popularity, with visits up by about 40%. So, clearly we have changed our activities, and it looks like many of these behaviours are set to remain.
Our towns and cities are changing, and we can see it happening around us. But it’s a complex picture. Whilst some have speculated that we are going to witness a long-term boom in the suburbs as everyone moves out of our towns and cities – this is not the case. Despite the jolt that Covid brought there are too many interactions at play for all the old links to be broken.
CACI’s research, carried out as restrictions were eased, revealed that many 18 to 34 year olds, many in the target age groups for nurseries, were keen to return to our towns and cities. These included people from across the demographic spectrum with groups with very different lifestyles – from ‘City Sophisticates’ to ‘Struggling Estates’ in CACI’s Acorn classification amongst those most keen to return to urban living.
Consumers are listing eating out, entertainment and leisure activities as the top reasons for wanting to return.
In short, for many our towns and cities remain places of fun, choice and opportunity – and this hasn’t changed with the pandemic. What we are seeing is that towns and cities are responding to this need. At CACI we have never been so busy in supporting our leisure clients who are busy trying to extend their portfolios, filling the units vacated by retailers hit by the step change in online shopping triggered by the pandemic. And other urban offices and former retail units are being repurposed as urban living – a clear sign that everyone is not heading for the countryside and suburbs.
For many, working patterns look like they have changed for the long-term. Evidenced in the conversion of office space to other purposes and in the areas of blue on the map of central London in worker dominated areas. Our research revealed that workers claim that 2 to 3 days is the optimum number of days they would like to spend in the office, and this seems to be becoming the norm for many. But, it is important to remember that not everyone has this option, including most workers in the nursery sector. It is very easy to think everyone can work from home easily, but affluence, age, location and job role all clearly play a part.
Source: CACI / Digital Envoy
Analysing Kantar’s TGI survey data from 2021 shows that, even in a year scattered with various work from home advice, only 25% of those surveyed said that they worked from home every day, or some days, as their ‘normal’ behaviour.
The chart, using CACI’s broad Acorn Categories to dissect responses, clearly illustrates that it is the ‘Rising Prosperity’ that are most likely to be working from home. These are younger, well educated professionals moving up the career ladder and living in our major towns and cities. 38% of this segment claim to work from home at least some days, and 25% of this is made up of those working from home every day. In contrast only 20 or 21% of lower paid, lower qualified segments ‘Financially Stretched’ and ‘Urban Adversity’ have the luxury of even working from home some days.
Source: CACI / Kantar
As a result of this shift workplace nurseries will no doubt continue to suffer, as many will prefer the flexibility of nurseries closer to home, in line with the shift to ‘hybrid’ working, with many neighbourhood nurseries benefiting from this change. The number of parents requiring nursery spaces is unlikely to be impacted by the rise in home working, as many learnt during the Covid lockdowns that working from home and providing childcare don’t mix. However, many nurseries are likely to see increasing staffing and pricing complexity with parents expecting a level of flexibility that reflects the new-found flexibility in their working hours and location.
So, despite big changes there is no evidence to suggest a need for wholesale changes in where acquisitive nursery groups should be focussing their attention. The big urban to rural shift is not happening and indeed CACI’s research shows that even at the peak of the pandemic 10% of house moves were from villages to towns and cities. Tracking planning applications reveals huge amounts of new dwellings under construction or being proposed in our urban areas and, whilst much of this will have been planned before the pandemic, it’s not that easy to turn a tanker. It is simply not possible for such a shift to happen without fundamental changes in planning policy and housing stock.
So, in summary whilst the change in residential patterns are moderate it is the behaviours of those residents that have changed, and the following are just a few more key behaviour changes that CACI expect to remain:
Communities are eager to stay local
This is good news for nurseries operating well-run community nurseries. But it is increasingly important for nurseries to engage with their wider communities and larger groups need to take care not to look like corporate outsiders
Social governance is increasingly in the spotlight
With consumers expecting their suppliers to behave ethically and transparently
Minimising waste and environmental impact is mainstream
All nurseries now need to ensure that they are meeting parents’ expectations here and that they are living out the values of care for the environment that the children will inherit
Digital is critical to recruitment and engagement
There is no doubt that digital is here to stay – so if you are not happy with your website you can be sure that it is putting off potential customers and if you are not sharing key messages with your parents via emails and portals then you may get left behind
New Challenges and Opportunities
Unfortunately, with inflation and rising rocketing fuel prices, there is no doubt that many families are going to be facing increasingly tough decisions about where to prioritise their spending in the year ahead. This could impact customers’ ability to afford childcare, especially if their salaries rise above the eligibility threshold for free places, but their true disposable incomes fall.
Rising fuel costs for nurseries will compound the challenges of rising wages already driven by the shortfall in staffing that so many in the sector are facing and these need to be factored into nurseries strategic plans.
Successful nurseries should take note of these consumer and market changes, play to their strengths in these areas and they will thrive. But ignore them at their peril as the sector faces the two emerging, and partly inter-related challenges of staffing and the cost-of-living crisis.
Will an upswing in the collective consumer conscience suppress spending? Is the force still strong with bargain hunters? We share what we’ve learned this year about your customers’ attitudes and behaviours towards physical and digital retail.
All of our inboxes are overflowing with urgent pleas from retailers to enter the seasonal frenzy of late November purchasing. But consumer champion Which? is warning shoppers to be wary of Black Friday bargains promoted by retailers online and on the high street.
How seriously should we take reported public cynicism about Black Friday? Many retailers and brands are pinning their hopes for a strong year end on UK consumers going big on November deals this year as they plan for an ultra-happy Christmas. As the Sainsbury’s ad says, “It’s been a long time coming, so let’s savour every moment of it.”
But trends for sustainability and localism could make a dent in post-Covid consumer exuberance, along with continued supply chain disruption. Impacts relating to social inequality and digital inclusion are also disquieting citizens and activists around the world.
Will oppositional social media coverage and prickling consumer consciences exert enough pressure to reverse Black Friday’s now traditional spending surge? We take a look at key trends and evidence that will influence 2021’s Black Friday outcomes for retailers and brands.
Do consumers trust the promise of Black Friday bargains?
Brands and retailers are understandably eager to cash in on consumers’ desire to get the most for their money in the run-up to Christmas. But according to Which? research released last week, up to 76% of people who bagged a Black Friday bargain in various categories in 2020 “later regretted these purchases.” Which? retail editor Ele Clark blames “the hype around the sales” for fuelling impulse buying. She raises concerns about the level of debt that some shoppers incur to fund their purchases, from home appliances and DIY kit to homeware and health and beauty.
Which? calls out retail giants including Amazon, John Lewis and ao.com for offering Black Friday prices last year that were higher than at other times before and after Black Friday.
98.5% of over 200 items scrutinised were cheaper or the same price in the six months after Black Friday 2020. The same applied to 92% in the six months before. That information could drive more suspicious shopping behaviour, with consumers taking their time to research deals carefully before hitting ‘buy’.
Sustainability is becoming a mainstream matter
The ethics of short-term promotions and pressure on consumers to make a fast decision aren’t the only controversial aspects of Black Friday.
In the aftermath of the COP26 summit, environmental concerns are becoming mainstream for more consumers. We hear that searches for “sustainable gifts” are up and more customers intend to shop mindfully. This could mean that shoppers will buy fewer gifts, purchase more locally or favour home-made or experience-based gifts that don’t generate carbon emissions through mass production or delivery.
The Make Friday Green Again collective of fashion retailers is taking a stand against what it regards as unhealthy patterns of consumer consumption. Brands that don’t want to take part in Black Friday 2021 are sharing Make Friday Green Again’s messages through a communications pack that hopes to encourage consumers to purchase more sustainably and boycott Black Friday events altogether.
Beyond the fashion sector, up to 85% of independent retailers in the UK are boycotting Black Friday with some going as far as closing down their websites for the day. Others will donate profits to charity or plant trees to help the environment. It’s partly a response to the wasteful over-consumption that Black Friday is perceived to encourage, and partly as a protest against the dominance of online retailers like Amazon.
This trend is not just for small independent retailers. Marks & Spencer and Next are two flagship UK retailers who don’t take part. IKEA too is taking a deliberately different approach, offering 20% extra on their buyback scheme for pre-loved furniture. These actions should appeal to sustainability-minded consumers and could support perceptions of social and environmental responsibility for the brand.
The reality of consumer choices and affordability
Not all your customers will think and act the same way. There are conflicting trends in socially and environmentally conscious behaviours and choices. PWC found that Londoners had the largest appetite in the UK for Black Friday deals in 2019, with more than two thirds planning to spend online. They also typically spend the most. This probably reflects higher average incomes in London. PWC’s latest Consumer Insights report also found that males typically spend more than females, and are more likely to treat themselves on Black Friday 2021 rather than looking for Christmas gifts.
Successful Black Friday retailers will develop a range of targeted messages to match different consumer preferences and intentions.
The stance taken by Which? implies that Black Friday hype can still be persuasive enough to lure unwary shoppers into debt – it’s a bad look for retailers to appear to be targeting consumers who may struggle to repay loans or credit card bills, particularly if the implied savings are not what they seem. That points to a need for nuanced, segmented customer messaging, for a socially responsible impact.
Last-minute disappointment from scarcities and shortages
The shortage of delivery and HGV drivers and shipping delays in the global supply chain have influenced some people to start shopping earlier, reflecting their fears that availability of some consumer goods will be limited.
GlobalData reports that over 40% of consumers believe this will be an issue. This could add to the feverish pressure of limited-time Black Friday promotions and ads, giving customers the sense that it’s their last chance to get their hands on desirable Christmas gifts. Online retailers with a reputation for being trustworthy and transparent about stock and delivery times will have a greater consumer pull.
Glitches and hitches switch customers off Black Friday online
46% said they would stop shopping with a retailer online altogether if their app crashes on Black Friday.
Our experience working with digital retailers bears this out: it’s high-risk to add in new functionality and offers at the last minute unless you’ve thoroughly tested them and have a robust ecommerce platform and data to build on.
Concerns about the robustness and capacity of retailer websites could drive consumers back onto the high street, where they may feel more confident about the face-to-face shopping experience. Nonetheless, John Lewis must be confident in its digital experience, expecting 70% of its Black Friday sales via online channels and just 30% in-store.
What we’ve learned… so far
Debate rages about which of the competing trends will be most influential and we look forward to seeing the commercial results for leading brands, revealing the success or otherwise of their 2021 Black Friday approach.
Our verdict for now:
Black Friday 2021 will still engage many consumers. More and more brands will consider the sustainability implications of promotions and will do what they can to reassure customers that they’re controlling waste and carbon emissions
Canny consumers will do their research before succumbing to email hyperbole and Black Friday countdowns
Retailers who offer genuine value and a consistent digital and in-store customer experience will do best from the event, not just on the day but in building lasting loyalty
Organisations who can track and review customer behaviour after the event will have valuable learnings to draw on for future promotional events and Black Fridays to come.
If you’d like to share your views on Black Friday or to talk to us about how data and tech can help your organisation deliver effective promotions and sustainable customer experiences, please get in touch.
The opportunity for Landsec to re-engage customers and their spend as we emerge from the pandemic is substantial. 2020 saw the greatest level of consumer disruption ever seen in living memory with mandatory retail and leisure closures, stay at home orders, and schools and offices closing.
Landsec’s key questions included; who is driving performance, where they are coming from, how much are they spending per category, what they are doing in centre, and how are they engaging ? This helped the Landsec team identify why guests have reengaged and how to influence future behaviours. Tracking information was also used to provide the data points needed to allow Landsec to measure ROI on marketing and leasing activity.
The solution
CACI’s solution used transactional spend and mobile data to track real life actual behaviour in the centre. Mobile data looks at GPS tracking from mobile apps and helped Landsec understand the visitation patterns.
Transactional spend data is derived from credit and debit card spend data from multiple sources, including top UK retail bank and credit card companies. Again, this data was used alongside CACI’s data sources to and understand which categories and brands were driving spend and transactional changes.
Catchment spend for all the centres was also tracked using the transactional spend data, as well as a valuable indication of online spending for the centres’ shoppers.
The benefits
The data was used by the Landsec centre teams to fully understand the immediate impacts of the pandemic and how the centres performed over this period. In addition the research gave them an understanding of how best to react to the easing of future lockdowns in 2021. The research is now being rolled out across the whole of 2021, to track performance on a regular basis for some of Landsec’s key assets.
Read the case study
Read the full customer story here. To find out more about how CACI can help you support your business, pleaseget in touch.
Founder and award-winning social entrepreneur Joe Seddon explains how Zero Gravity works: “To identify the most high potential students from low-income backgrounds, we’ve built a contextual recruitment algorithm which crunches data about applicants’ socio-economic and educational background. This system draws on simple information in applicants’ profiles, such as their home postcode and secondary school, to draw conclusions about their prior performance and barriers to success.
Now that London levels of postcode inequality have now become a nationwide phenomenon, our algorithm requires geo-demographic targeting at an increasingly granular level so we can target our services where they’re needed most.
The solution
Asking applicants to provide their postcode is a very ordinary requirement for registering with any online service today. From that single piece of information, CACI’s Acorn dataset provides rich, accurate and up-to-date socio-demographic information, helping to contextualise Zero Gravity applicants. “People expect to give a small amount of identifying data – sharing their home postcode is not a big deal when students are getting so much value for free,” says Joe. “Acorn provides just as robust an indication of family income from applicant postcodes as free school meals data, without any intrusion or sense of being patronised.”
The benefits
The impact was huge. “When thousands of secondary students signed up with us last year, we automatically knew which of them were in the greatest need. It was a hugely valuable tool.”
Joe sees wider future applications for the Acorn data in further education and development, which will benefit students, educators and employers alike.
Corporate employers and universities are becoming increasingly interested in spotting the best talent from non-traditional backgrounds and making sure no one falls through the net. Whether it’s targeting students for bursaries, putting a university application in context, or providing targeted mentoring support – Acorn data can be an incredibly powerful resource.
Joe Seddon, Founder and CEO, Zero Gravity
Read the case study
Read the full customer story here. If you have any questions or want to learn more about our solutions, please get in touch with us.
Monkey Puzzle is the UK’s largest day nursery franchise network, with over 60 nurseries nationwide. For over thirty years, the Monkey Puzzle team has worked closely with parents, staff and Ofsted to deliver childcare of the highest quality, providing children aged three months to five years with unlimited opportunities to learn, develop and grow within a safe, secure and caring environment.
An award-winner in the 2020 Day Nurseries Top 20, Monkey Puzzle is growing strongly. It is always looking for new franchise sites and opportunities, led by a dedicated head office team. Monkey Puzzle also operates a handful of day nurseries directly, providing a benchmark of best practice for franchisees.
The Challenge
Understand the opportunities in franchise locations with enriched local customer insight.
Sophie Hailey is Monkey Puzzle’s Franchising and Property Acquisitions Associate, explains:
Before we engaged with CACI, when we were looking at a new site, the only demographic research we would do was competitor analysis. We would type the site postcode into the OFSTED website and look at comparable sites in a five mile radius. We would mystery shop them to find out about what they offered, the fees and waiting lists, to help us establish a suitable proposition and pricing for our potential new nursery.
When you visit a site, you can get a good feel for a location. This is really important, as is the competitor research, but we needed more information and evidence to back up our decisions, as our network expands. We wanted to give our franchisees confidence as well as committing to the right sites for our model. The more relevant insight we have, the better our decisions can be.
The Approach
Sophie Hailey, Monkey Puzzle’s Franchising and Property Acquisitions Associate talked to CACI about Monkey Puzzle’s franchising and the kind of information that was important in her decision-making process. Acorn and InSite reporting would give Sophie and the team access to valuable customer demographic and local market information to enrich their understanding of new and existing sites and opportunities in the local area. Sophie explains:
The site reports we generate help us to narrow down potential sites quickly – we look at a number of factors about the catchment that tell us whether it’s worth investigating a proposed site further. We can see how close it is to existing sites, so we can avoid cannibalisation, as well as how strong the customer demand might be in the local community and workforce.
The Results
With InSite reporting and Acorn data, Sophie and her colleagues have a clear, shared knowledge base that informs the franchise development process with consistent and up-to-date customer and location information.
Our nurseries are currently gathering postcode information from existing customers, so we can map exactly where they come from in each catchment. This will help us understand our existing customer base better and recommend how to customise the proposition and marketing for different types of location.
Sophie Hailey, Monkey Puzzle’s Franchising and Property Acquisitions Associate
