A highly engaged customer base using the NFC contactless
payment service

In 2012, the use of contactless payments was on the rise particularly with the advent of newer mobile phones with built-in NFC (Near-field Communication) chips. Our customer was among the first Australian bank to leverage Android 4.0’s HCE technology to build contactless payments functionality within its mobile banking app. A key business goal was to have a highly engaged customer base using the NFC contactless payment service. Servian was engaged to deliver the campaign to achieve this goal using our combination of campaign and data expertise.

Problems & pain points

Identifying customers

Being a technology leader is part of the bank’s value proposition and having a strong NFC contactless service was important to their strategy. For the project to be a success, a strong user base needed to be established to justify the offering and their technology focused customers needed to be satisfied that they bank had a reliable NFC service.

Service affinity

The next challenge was identifying customers that would be most interested in using the service. For high retention rates it was important that only those with a strong desire to use the service were targeted. As this was a brand-new service there is no prior “usage” data to rely on, and it became important to observe behaviours from other similar services and make inferences.

Engaging experiences

Once target customers were defined, the final challenge was to understand who makes up the target audience, identify sub-groups and create appropriate incentives, offers and content that resonated best with each group. The data to support this was not readily available and the capability to perform clustering analysis was unavailable.

Eligible customers

Within the Payments Division at our client, identifying existing customers with compatible mobile devices was new and challenging – as they didn’t have access to a source of data that identified these customers.

Solutions and outcomes

End-to-end planning, engagement, and execution

Servian took the lead on the analysis, planning, coordination and engagement with stakeholders to design, develop and deliver the awareness campaign to introduce contactless payments to qualifying customers.

Data sourcing and analysis

Web tracking data, mobile app usage data and a public list of compatible mobile devices supporting NFC were blended together to identify the eligible target customers base. This was then further enriched with transactional data to perform clustering analysis which identified a number of sub-groups, for which relevant and engaging content was developed and delivered through the campaign.

Post execution deep dive transactional data

A deep dive was carried out one month after the launch of the campaign. A profile was built for each of the customers looking at both their adoption and activation of the service, and their transactional behavior. A clear correlation could be observed between customers’ transactional behavior and their use of NFC contactless payments.

Survey and social media data analysis

Data from customer surveys, Facebook & Twitter was pulled together to bring a social perspective on how customers felt about the NFC payments functionality and what could be improved for future releases of the mobile banking app.

The results

The successful campaign execution and deep dive resulted in the mobile app team further refining the mobile app user experience and addressing pain points. Similarly, the marketing team were empowered to fine tune their campaign strategies and creative material and incrementally improved the responses. The overall result was a highly engaged customer base, as measured by their adoption of NFC contactless payments.