ABN AMRO is the third largest bank in the Netherlands, and has a clear purpose: banking for better, for generations to come. They want to be a trusted partner, creating long-term value for their clients, and to be there for them at moments that matter. This purpose is the compass in everything the bank does. Like in their communication with customers by delivering a personalized and valuable customer experience as well as delivering a good employee experience.
Revised content strategy
To achieve the best customer and employee experience the bank revised their content strategy, application landscape and marketing tools. They concluded that the technical stack was under pressure and could not meet future requirements. Furthermore, their employees struggled with the tools at hand such as their CMS (Content Management System). The bank – driven by its internal team – sought a solution and had clear outcomes in mind. The bank wants to be able to:
- Give each customer a personalized experience.
- Build relevant, personalized content and make it available across various channels.
- Unify content assets.
- Increase the efficiency of the entire content lifecycle – from content creation, reviewing, approving, and publishing across channels.
- Simplify the application landscape.
- Improve brand consistency.
- Improve performance and stability of the marketing tools for the business.
Central hub for digital assets
ABN AMRO concluded the best way to improve all aspects was to implement Sitecore Content Hub, a central hub for their digital assets, content operations, and distribution. The bank turned to Sitecore Platinum Partner, Macaw, for advice and to take on the implementation, as they have the desired knowledge and experience and had the availability of two Sitecore Most Valuable Professionals (MVPs) to work on the project, making the company the preferred candidate for the job.
Alignment on goals
Since the bank had been preparing its vision and desired direction for some time, Macaw organized a series of workshops in the first phase to quickly reach mutual agreement on the exact scope, timeline and deliverables, and to learn about any risks. Macaw followed their tried & tested methodology that includes five phases. This approach was a key success factor because it makes the implementation predictable and manageable at each step.
Benefits
In addition to improving the customer experience through the creation of relevant, personalized content and its distribution via the customer’s preferred device and channel, the bank also reported big gains in terms of cost reduction and increased employee efficiency thanks to the optimized content workflow, centralized digital asset management and content creation. The cumbersome and manual process of downloading, re-sizing images and then emailing them to a colleague, or for a given file size, sharing them via Dropbox, is a thing of the past. When managing 4,000 pages, and uploading 1,300 assets per month, the improved ease of use results in considerable time savings. Copy writing issues have also been resolved and manual work has given way to automatic messaging.
Bank employees and external partners can organize content such as images, videos, marketing content and icons in one system, making it easier to find the right asset. Similarly, the workflow for sharing concepts, gathering feedback, and obtaining approval increased both efficiency and flexibility while simultaneously reducing time spent. The high level of user-friendliness started making rounds within ABN AMRO.
Nathalja Nijman, product owner “Customer Content Capability” at ABN AMRO, says:
‘We get requests, for example from the intranet team, whether they can also use Sitecore because it is simply so easy to work with, saves time and eliminates frustrations. That is the best proof that it works.’
ABN AMRO can also more easily protect its brand identity, ensure the quality, and use of assets through a governance process, and ensure that marketing teams communicate consistently and according to guidelines worldwide.
Better ranking
Thanks to using the Digital Asset Management solution, which means the images come directly scaled from the system and improve the loading time of each page, the pages rank substantially better which results in more leads, more online sales, and more revenue.
Serve customers with the best digital assets
Sitecore Content Hub is ABN AMRO’s very first Digital Asset Management tool and Nathalja Nijman is pleased with this step. She says: ‘We can now serve customers with the best digital assets according to their device, and channel preference. Additionally, the optimized SEO rankings of product pages, lead to an increase in online sales and findability of services.’
Colleague Adam Overdevest, IT Lead Digital Channel & Content Capability at ABN AMRO, adds:
‘ABN AMRO has taken a major step towards the mature deployment of digital assets. This makes it possible to handle assets more smartly and efficiently and positively impacts the engagement with our customers.
