Marcel van der Laan (ABN AMRO): “Agile working creates a lot of focus!”
ABN AMRO is the winner of the most recent WUA online orientation study of opening a savings account in The Netherlands. Marcel van der Laan is senior online sales specialist e-commerce with ABN AMRO. A talk about Digital Banking, fluid flows, focus through agile working, the importance of findability, and the heavy emphasis on mobile development at the bank.
Congratulations, Marcel van der Laan! You are the winner of this WUA online orientation study of opening a savings account. How important is it for you to be the best?
“Obviously I am very happy that we came out on top! This shows that we offer customers relevant content in their online search for a savings account. So we see this award as an incentive to further improve our website. Our challenge now is to remain in first place; we really can’t sit still, because the competition won’t either. I have several colleagues and specialists around me, and without them we wouldn’t have won this award. This is truly a team effort!”
You scored highest of all providers, but the differences were small. What is going so well for you?
“A year ago, ABN AMRO started Digital Banking, and since then we have grown, in terms of the number of people as well as the number of specialists we have attracted. With these specialists, we look beyond the products we offer. We look at the entire customer journey. An example: Previously, a single marketer would deal with SEO as well as SEA within the online division. We now have specialists for this, who share what they do with the marketers. This creates a lot more focus on defined focus areas.
“This WUA study shows that our findability has increased enormously, the high findability even led us to our victory. We’ve put a lot of focus on this findability. Our work has become more efficient, more agile. We work with sprints, and per sprint we tackle issues by really sinking our teeth into them. We finish things, we are really executing things. This approach is reflected in rising online visitors. Of course we consider it important that people find us. Consumers often use Google at the beginning of their journey, so you should be there for them to find you…”
So before agile working, you never finished anything and you didn’t have a lot of focus? Agile doesn’t sound so bad!
“Haha. Agile working just creates a lot of focus. In the past, we were sometimes doing ten things simultaneously. Of course projects were finished and we got lots of things done. But being occupied with many things at the same time can affect the quality. Because now a single person is on top of it, we can perform deeper analyses, it is easier to see where differences occur, and we’re working as efficiently as possible! We’re not there yet, but we are making great strides. It’s just that ABN AMRO is a very large company, and it is therefore difficult to get all stakeholders involved. The involvement of stakeholders is essential, by the way: you really do need that to achieve effective agile working.”
What is the role of customer research and customer focus in your daily work?
“Putting the customer, or even better, the customer’s interests first, that’s our priority. We never sit still. That is the cool thing about the online world. We are really doing it for the customer, that may sound a little cliché, but that’s just how it is: without customers, we wouldn’t earn a living. We’re working with figures on a daily basis. Sales figures, but also end-to-end data and funnel analyses. On the web environments, we work with Usabilla. With this tool, we measure the Customer Effort Score, in other words, how much effort did it take you to complete an online task? We also receive helpful customer feedback via this tool.
“We then use all the information and data generated by the tool to improve the site. Actually, we don’t just look at online, but also experiences on other channels, for example from the advice and service centres. If we find there are multiple reports of things on the site being wrong or unclear, we can do something about it.
“And of course we do a lot of A/B testing, also at funnel level. Almost everything we develop right now is tested in our own UX lab, on both mobile and desktop. We invite customers and ask for their opinion. Based on that, we will develop further our tools or funnels. We actually do very little without direct customer feedback: we have customer panels where we can test a proposition to see how customers experience it.”
Are you also working on content segmentation at customer level?
“Definitely, but for now mostly behind the login environment. We try to be as relevant as possible and after they log in, we are able recognise our customers, of course. There, we are more relevant and personal. This is often more successful than using a scattergun approach, which is reflected in the customer experience figures.”
What is your biggest digital challenge?
“We are now focusing on the huge growth in mobile. We want to make our processes as mobile as possible. If we are talking about savings: we just implemented a responsive flow for the application for a savings account to ensure that the customer experience is more pleasant and that it looks good on mobile. We want to develop much more rapidly, and before you know it, time overtakes you. We don’t just want this for savings, by the way, but throughout ABN AMRO.
“The hardest thing for me and my team, and I think the same goes for other digital teams within the bank, is the technical stuff. All mobile devices need to be able to ‘talk’ to our pages and our systems. With us you can apply for a savings account via online banking, for example, and this account will then be immediately visible to the customer. This interconnection with a closed domain, that is a technical challenge. The advantage of a responsive flow is that you can apply for it online using a five-digit code, but there is a piece of technology and authentication behind it, and that makes it difficult sometimes. I accept this technical digital challenge with great pleasure, by the way: we will certainly succeed. Fortunately, we now have more specialists on board in order to accelerate and improve all processes, together with our mobile development department. This cooperation also ensures more speed than ever before!”
How do you view service in relation to sales? Could service eventually become the new sales?
“Sales companies without service, it doesn’t work: one cannot exist without the other. An example. In my team, we’re trying to make the application flows for savings accounts as easy and pleasant as possible. At the same time, I think it is also important that a customer who may want to close their account has an easy and pleasant experience too. They shouldn’t leave us with any negative feelings. That‘s not sales. That’s service.
“Another example: We encourage customers to save automatically. Without any fuss you put aside a certain amount each month. Even better is that customers are able to set a minimum amount they want to keep in their current account, so their automatic saving doesn’t inadvertently cause a deficit in their current account. That’s a nice service, if I may say so myself. We also provide PIN saving: you can choose to put aside 1%, 5%, or 10% of every PIN or debit card transaction. These are small amounts, but they will still help you save up without any commitments. A lot of Dutch people have a hole in their pocket, so I do see this as service: we can help people achieve their savings goals. And yes, of course we as a bank benefit if people are saving up more. We use it for lending, in the form of mortgages for example. It’s a win-win situation.”
“We want to make our customers aware that it’s nice to have some money on hand. NIBUD encourages it too. So we try to do more content marketing, and that is a lot like providing service: we provide more tips, we stay topical, give people guidance when it comes to subjects like the low savings interest rates, and its causes and consequences.”
Are there any cool things in the making at ABN AMRO within your focus area? What digital innovations are you working on?
“We want to offer the customer a much more fluid mobile experience. Very soon we will make multiple application paths and flows for savings responsive, so it’ll become even easier and better. We see a huge growth in mobile, and customers are literally asking us to allow them to arrange more via mobile. We want to be right there, where the customer needs us. We are going to make the savings experience even better to keep our number 1 position! That’s quite a challenge, actually: the competition aren’t sitting still, and are also revealing some great things…”
