PegaWorld iNspire 2024: National Australia Bank keynote - Left Brain. Right Brain. Customer Brain.

So how are you? Doing alright? Alright. So far, so good. Okay, excellent. So if you wouldn't mind, Jess, would you mind giving these folks ... I think it would be really great background if you could tell them a little bit about where you've been, like, kind of your role, your background, because it's very tangent to this conversation. Sure. I like to say I've been in data before data got cool.

And so I've, you know, been like a data person, but I understand that numbers aren't everything. I've been a marketer, but I understand that creativity isn't everything. And so what I like to do is I like to blend insight with creativity and help create great experiences for customers. So first of all, data was always cool. There was never a point where data wasn't. Sure Matt, you tell yourself that. Hurt my feelings. So in the video, we talked about the concept of a customer brain. And I think for a lot of folks in this audience, that's probably a relatively new concept.

Would you mind kind of explaining that, like what you folks do at NAB, like what the customer brain kind of means to you? Yeah. Well, you mentioned relationship banking before, and NAB really prides itself on being a relationship-led bank. And so when we talk about relationships, we say, you know, they're kind of personal. They're human. And so, you know, we've been helping people, businesses, communities for 160 years grow, adapt and change and move forward really. So you think about customers' preferences, a lot of them are shifting to digital. So our job then is to think, alright, we bring these experiences online. We're creating ease and convenience for customers.

But it's an interesting challenge. Like how do you maintain that human relationship and that personal connection. So that's where the customer brain comes into play. And as Christian said on the big screen, it's about using everything that we know about our customers to provide personalized, timely, relevant communications, and that's across all of our channels, inbound, outbound, human, digital. And we're really trying to empower our customers digitally, but also support them personally. OK, so I'm going to start asking you the tough questions. This is where it gets hard. I'm ready. OK with that?

So in a lot of places everybody talks about the idea of customer experience and we play it up. In a lot of organizations, that's kind of lip service more than anything else. I'll say that you didn't say that, right? But like why at NAB was it important to maintain that human connection? Because we all talk about it, but when the rubber hits the road, that can be very difficult to actually do in the role. I mean, it's a simple answer. It's important to us because it's important to our customers. You know, as trite as that might sound, that is It's what's important to our customers. And when you speak to them, they're like, what makes it different to bank at NAB is we want you to treat us like an individual, not like a number.

So that's why it's super important to us. OK. So let me ask you this. So you said that you folks are inbound, outbound. You said you had how many? 10 million customers. 10 million. That's an awful lot of if you think of, uh, if you have 10 million customers and you're running probably hundreds of customer engagement programs, and you're doing that across dozens of channels between inbound and outbound. Yeah, 10 million customers.

And they've you know, it's people just starting out opening up their first bank account. We're Australia's largest business lender. And so every business customer you speak to they say, you know, my business is unique, my business is different. And, you know, for them it's an expectation that we treat them that way. It is just absolute hygiene. So if you think about all the complexity of that and the scale of it, that feels like a lot. So how do you achieve that? How do you do that, if you will? Blood, sweat and tears.

So for our customer brain program, we implemented into all of our major channels. So we went from 0 to 75% coverage of customer interactions in less than 24 months. So we really wanted to get the scale in that breadth. But we also wanted to go after depth, depth of relationship. We want to engage with our customers throughout their entire relationship with us, not just at the point in time when we're, you know, they have a product need and we're making a sale. So we also delivered over 150 Next Best Actions, as we called them, across service, sales and engagement-type experiences. So if you think about that, think of the scope of that So 10 million customers, tons of channels, tons of engagement programs. You could be talking a billion interactions a year, right? You said you went from 0 to 75% coverage of that.

Like, that is monumental scope. You're making hundreds of millions of Next Best Action decisions. Well, you have to get to scale. Yeah. So and you're doing that like you said you were going for depth. Right. Which to me it comes down to how many conversations, actions as you call them, that you have. And you said, I think you said 150, which is a pretty deep roster, especially after not doing this for that long at net. So like, can you give us a couple examples like what are some of those Next Best Actions?

What do those look like? Because I think that would be great for these folks to hear. All right well I'll start off with like service, and so that's around making sure that our customers are getting the most from their banking relationship with NAB. So it could be like keeping ahead of your finances. Simple things like payment reminders. If you're getting close to your due date, you know, how do we make sure that you're going in really informed. We say that fraud and scams, it's hugely topical at the moment and education and awareness is completely, completely key. But we also do a lot of things for our customers where we can see maybe they can limit their fraud exposure through personalized communications. So that's from a service perspective.

I mean, sales is what it says on the tin if a customer has a product need, we want to make that experience as simple and as easy as possible. So it could be making sure that they've got the right product based on their need. Or it could be helping keep them informed through their product journey. Because as we know home loan getting that it could be quite a lengthy process. So how do we make sure they're aware of what's happening at every single stage of the process? Then the last thing for me is engagement, which I think is my favorite. This is like the fun category. And so this is like just simple things like celebrating milestones. You might be meeting your savings goal.

You might be paying down your mortgage. We've talked about this one for years. You know, the good old-fashioned happy birthday. It gets better with age. The digital and design teams created this great little experience in the app where you get a burst of confetti on your birthday when you when you open it. And you know, that's important because our customers that do engage with us, particularly in mobile, they're in there quite frequently. 65% of our customers, on average, hit the mobile app at least twice a day. So we've got a great opportunity to connect with them and engage with them and just keep a conversation going. That's a huge ...

if you think 10 million customers 65, that's a huge amount of engagement you're just driving on mobile. From some of them. So here's my question for you. Well, let me say this. When customers come to Pega, an awful lot of the time, our clients, they're really good at working on the acquisition type offers. They're really good at working on sales. It's a little bit less of a natural progression to talk about the service stuff that you just talked about, to talk about engagement. And I think the question that a lot of people ask is, "I get it in general, but why would I do that? What kind of difference does that make?" So I guess that's my question for you.

What kind of difference has that like really beyond sales moving into the more empathetic stuff. What kind of difference does that make for you? Well, as soon as we plug the brain in, we saw a 40% lift in customer engagement, like 40% , which is absolutely massive for our customers. And I think that it shows the fact that we're being more relevant. So it might mean that we actually speak to some of our customers less, but when we do, they can trust that it's going to be with something that's relevant in the moment for their need. And relevance is really what it comes down to. You're putting things in front of them that they want to see, that they want to interact with, which in general leads to eventually a lot better sales conversion because you kept them engaged. Is that fair? Correct.

Yeah. So your career has kind of gone, as you've described it, and as I understand it, you've gone from working in data and analytics. You were in marketing for a while, right? You came to the dark side with me. Then you went back over to data and analytics. So that gives you a really good perspective, I think, to kind of approach the customer brain. So how did that kind of help shape your strategy, if you will? Where did that did that have an impact? Yeah, definitely.

Like I think this time I did it quite differently. If you think about my career in data and particularly in financial services, we've got just a wealth of information about our customers. And then that's on one hand. And then on the other hand, you look at traditional marketing tools and you segment and you subsegment and you create segmentation, micro segmentation. You know, you create models trying to predict what a customer is going to do. On the other hand, you've got the data right in front of you, so you could be missing out on those clues that are right in front of you. So at NAB, we took our time up front with the customer brain program to I talked about it listening to the customers, but through data. What are they telling us? So we looked at Net Promoter Score.

We looked at complaints data. We looked at like different journeys where you can see customers were getting stuck along the way and we use that to prioritize our experiences. So I talk about all that engagement stuff, let's get the hygiene right, let's get some of those basic experiences right, and then we can move on to the engagement. So at the moment I think we've got about a thousand data attributes feeding the customer brain, just different things that we can see in customer data. And then we've got probably 800 adaptive models running at any point in time. So you're taking like the data that we have about the customers, but then you're also listening to how they're interacting and responding in real time to fuel the engine. And just to put that in perspective, when you're talking about 800 adaptive models, a thousand elements, what you're really talking about is machine learning, looking at the outcomes you want to achieve for each one of those actions and saying, what's the most relevant thing to put in front of a customer right now? And constantly those models adapting themselves as they go, right? Yeah.

It sounds like you think data is pretty cool, too. I think it's pretty cool. It's a little bit. I think it is now. Now, you know this I work at Pega, right? And I would probably be remiss if I didn't ask about our, if I didn't ask about our role in this. So like, how has Pega kind of helped you along this journey, if you will? So if I say it didn't, you're kind of in trouble here. I probably won't walk off the stage alive.

It might be career-limiting for you. All right. So there were probably two key things that Pega really helped us with. And the first one is simplification. So we knew we wanted to deliver value for our ... sorry, the first one is speed and then simplification. But on the speed front, we knew we wanted to deliver value for our customers really, really quickly. So I phoned up the Pega account team and they were completely on board. So NAB being cloud native, we had our Pega environments up and running within three weeks of signing our contract, which was massive.

That's cloud native, right? Yeah, exactly. So with a brand new platform, new tooling, the team got in there. And with the way that Pega works, we took our development cycle down from 12 weeks on average down to four. And it was great to just see that speed and simplicity. An unintended consequence of that was experimentation. So we can get in, we can develop something quickly and safely. We can test it and learn from how customers are interacting with it and optimize as we go. Would you say ...

so you have one brain with all of your actions, your offers, your data in it. Would you say that having it centralized makes you more agile in general? Is that a fair assessment? Yeah, definitely. And I think with a lot of tooling that personalization at scale can come at a cost. It leads to complexity. But I think with this, the way you modularize it, it definitely makes it easier to develop quickly and learn. OK. So as we've been talking, we're talking about a brain.

We're talking about hundreds of adaptive models. We're talking about billions of interactions every year. If you're out there in the audience and you're getting into this, that can seem like a lot. So I guess my question for you is if you were to talk to somebody out here who's just thinking about, OK, we're thinking about investing in a brain, what would your advice for those people be like? Where would you tell them to start or go? Yeah, the best piece of advice I can give you is to come to my breakout session with Lisa Marchant after this, and we'll unveil everything in there. That was really well-timed and I did not expect it. You actually made me laugh. OK, so aside from ...

and I agree with you, let's go to the breakouts where you're really going to get the real world details about how these folks are doing this and doing this exceptionally well. I agree with you. If you had to pick one thing to tell somebody, what would it be? OK, one thing? Well, I think the thing that has remained constant in the multiple implementations of this kind of engine that I've seen across my career would be, engage with your frontline early on. Who are the people that are dealing with your customers day in and day out and speak to them. So the first thing we did at NAB was we went and talked to a bunch of our bankers, we sat with them and we're like, OK, what do you look for when you're speaking to a customer? How do you see when they might need a little bit of help. What does that look like?

And so we took that, we codified it and we put it into the system. And that's that's really cool for two reasons. One, the bankers are super heroes, having to go to multiple different systems and look things up. It just made their lives so much simpler because in the morning, they know that there's going to be something there waiting for them. They don't have to do all of that work, and it means that they can spend the time with the customers, which is what really they want to do. And then secondly, that's a lot of knowledge they've built up over years and years and years. So, we've codified that whether you've been in the door as a banker for five minutes or five years, it can help create that consistency, that confidence to be able to pick up the phone to the customers. I would say this. So I think getting the bankers, it's like the best piece of advice for somebody going through Next Best Action getting your frontline involved, making them a piece of it.

And it's for a couple of reasons. First, they're the ones that have been talking to customers, that are engaging. They know what works. They know they have natural dialog with these folks. So you're going to get better offers, better actions, better recommendations. Second, I think you talked about codifying that. You can take the folks that are newer, that maybe aren't as as seasoned, that don't know as much. And you can bring them up to speed just by using Next Best Action recommendations, kind of giving them some guidance if you will, like you put them on more of a of a level playing field. Yeah.

It's about not just the customer experience but the colleague experience and working with the brain. And somebody reminded me this week that it's not just about getting them and engaging with them early on. It's about keeping those bankers engaged throughout the entire program and making sure that we're consistently testing and learning from them. They're your end customer at the end of the day. Exactly. And I think honestly, where you go with the bankers, at the end of the day, they're the ones that have to adopt the solution. So getting them involved just brings them into the process, makes them feel like they're a part of it, which always makes stuff like this easier every single time. Correct. So last question for you.

So big picture. If you think about all the stuff that we just talked about, you're really talking about implementing one brain across an entire enterprise. That's not a small thing, right? If you think of all the different programs that we talked about, there's a lot of ways to measure those, right? There's a lot of ways to think about success. So from a big picture perspective, how do you measure success at NAB? How do you think about that? Yeah. I guess success is that we've got one enterprise-wide platform.

We are the only game in town if he needs to make a decision and it needs to go out to a customer, it goes through the brain. And I think that's really important because if you've got lots of different systems communicating to your customers, it can actually end up having a really fragmented experience for them. It feels like it's disconnected for them as well. So I think that's how like what I would call success. But the thing I'm most proud of was actually seeing Joss and Andy up on the screen on stage. We were with our board recently, and it was Joss and Andy that were coming in, and they were talking about the impact that the brain was having for their business unit, for their customers, for their colleagues, and for me, that was probably the most rewarding thing was being able to see them talk about it. It's not my platform, it's theirs. I think that's honestly when, you know, you've kind of made it when you've hit the right note is when you've got your customers up there testifying to your board about how valuable your solution is. That's kind of when you made it a little bit.

That's why I'm here. Is it not? It probably is, quite honestly. So I have one ask for you. OK. And this has been an amazing conversation. One ask just don't make us wait 4 or 5 years till the next time you come back up here. Because that's the last time I got you up here. But ladies and gentlemen, Jess Cuthbertson.

Thank you. Great job.