National Australia Bank drives personalization with an AI-driven approach

The Business Issue

National Australia Bank (NAB) has been in operation for 160 years, serving more than 10 million customers across 700 locations in Australia and New Zealand. They faced the challenge of modernizing their customer engagement strategy as customer preferences shift increasingly toward digital channels.

Being known as a relationship-led bank, NAB needed to maintain the human and personal connection their customers valued. This complexity was further heightened by the need to handle millions of interactions across various channels, both digital and human, while ensuring personalized, timely, and relevant communications.

The Solution

To address these challenges, NAB created their “customer brain.” Powered by Pega Customer Decision Hub™, it’s fed by 1,000 data attributes and 800 adaptive models that power personalized, next best actions for every customer.

NAB moved swiftly by becoming cloud-native, getting their Pega environments up and running within three weeks of signing their contract. This helped reduce the traditional development cycle time from 12 weeks to four weeks, enabling rapid experimentation.

From there, NAB was able to build more than 150 next best actions across service, sales, and engagement experiences. NAB also integrated the customer brain into all major channels – achieving 75% coverage of customer interactions within 24 months.

To ensure the success of the customer brain, NAB built sponsorship both bottom-up and top-down. Key business stakeholders were engaged early on, creating momentum and ensuring everyone remained aligned on the bank’s strategy. They also engaged frontline bankers early in the process to codify their insights and improve the system's accuracy and relevance.

The Results

NAB's customer brain became the single, enterprise-wide platform for customer decision-making, now powering a connected customer experience.

The bank saw a substantial uptick in engagement by converting inbound signals into real-time outbound interactions, which enabled them to hyper-personalize the customer experience, ensure the appropriate frequency, and engage their customers with empathy to foster strong relationships.

The central brain also enriched employee experiences. Internal feedback from bankers was positive, highlighting the timeliness and relevance of leads generated by the brain, enhancing their ability to proactively support customers. Bankers found their workflow significantly simplified, allowing them to spend more time interacting with customers rather than navigating multiple systems.

The customer brain has led to significant improvements:

• 40% uplift in engagement after implementing the customer brain
• 50% increase in conversion in the mortgage lending space
• 3X more opportunities thanks to improved targeting and timely lead delivery
• Reduced customers’ exposure to fraud thanks to payments limits

Hear more about NAB’s journey in their PegaWorld session.