Customer Portal Adoption Surged up to 9x with Behavioural Science

Our client developed a new digital portal to reduce pressure on their call centre for service queries. Communications campaigns advertising the portal’s benefits had been unsuccessful and it remained underused by customers, meaning call centre expenses remained high.

Insight: Tailoring to customer groups can drastically boost results

The existing communication approach did not give customers a reason to act now, leading to engagement with the portal never taking place.

• The timing of the communications in the customer journey was misjudged
• A single, one-size-fits-all communication sent to all customers did not sufficiently address the varied feelings of different customer groups

The Solution: Using behavioural science to inform content and strategy

We maximised the potential of the communications through pragmatic selection of customers and customisation to these groups:

• Segmentation and tailoring: Tailoring communications to groups of customers who are differentiated meaningfully in terms of their behaviour
• Timing: Maximising impact by intervening at specific parts of the customer journey
• Urgency: Using tested linguistic techniques to boost perceived urgency

The Results

• Improvement in digital adoption in all groups
• Depending on the group, performance was between 2–9x greater than the status quo
• Set a digital-first habit in customers to reduce call centre pressure

Big Takeaway

Meaningful segmentation and tailoring can be done pragmatically when data is relatively unavailable, and this can be used to greatly improve performance.