How AI-based feedback analytics powers growth at Atom bank

Recently, I joined a webinar with Michael Sherwood, Head of Digital Experience at Atom bank. Together, we discussed their mission to create a differentiated and customer-centric banking experience. Having been a customer of Thematic for over 3 years, the insights they’ve gained with us have been integral to their strategy.

In case this is your first time reading our blog, here’s a quick overview of Thematic:

Put simply, Thematic is an AI solution to help CX teams analyze customer feedback faster and more accurately.

We know that meaningful customer feedback is everywhere. It’s a largely untapped opportunity for businesses. However, it’s hard to unlock the value using traditional tools and approaches. This is because:

• These days, there’s more data than ever before and it is being captured in so many different ways. It's scattered across a variety of touchpoints and channels.
  
• Ways of collecting feedback are evolving quickly. Gathering all feedback and analyzing it effectively has become a difficult capability to develop internally.
  
• Common methods of processing feedback are either superficial or rigid. Insight professionals often only can use their data to prove what they think they know. It is difficult to uncover the unknowns.

Thematic’s solution gathers all this feedback and finds insightful themes in it.

Users can work with AI to decide how the themes get organised, enabling full transparency. Users can then drill into the details of the data. These visual insights easily answer key business questions. Equally, they can be presented to wider stakeholders so they can understand the data too.

Ultimately, we’ve built Thematic to be a flexible and fast solution for CX teams. Leading to why Atom Bank and Thematic began working together… You can get a personalized demo of Thematic here.

Customer insights are at the heart of Atom bank’s ambitions

Atom bank is a relatively young bank that set out to disrupt the industry. From day one, they took customer feedback seriously. Insights from customer feedback have enabled them to pioneer, develop and continuously improve digital experiences. Every change they've made has been built on one core belief: “Everything we do should make customers’ lives easier”.

Pioneering truly customer-centric digital banking experiences required a robust and scalable VoC programme.

Atom bank’s VoC programme has evolved overtime alongside their customer touchpoints. From the very beginning, they established a diverse range of feedback channels. They frequently ran surveys, focus groups and engaged in online communities. The intent was to uncover underserved customer needs.

Gaining customer insights efficiently presented many challenges.

They were collecting a range of feedback through various channels and touchpoints. This meant A LOT of data - as well as different types of data.

In addition, Atom bank had previously been limited to quite traditional forms of data-processing. The data was held in spreadsheets and there was a lot of manual work involved in making sense of it.

They were looking for a way to simplify this kind of work - without losing speed or needing to hire more people.

To build their customer intelligence capabilities, they needed a digital solution to work alongside their human expertise.

First though, they needed to unify their data, streamlining their ability to process it.

Unifying Siloed Data Streams to create a Customer Goodwill Score

Atom Bank had all sorts of ratings and metrics being collected, such as:

• App store scores
• Customer complaint logs
• Trust pilot reviews

To name a few... And all were using different scales.

They wanted one strategic measure across all these different feedback channels. So, they worked with us at Thematic to unify all these different feedback metrics to create one score.

The Customer Goodwill score

A single score was created, called the Customer Goodwill score, which maps every metric onto a 1 to 100 scale. This means interaction touchpoints can be measured consistently.

From there, Thematic linked Customer Goodwill Score to themes that drive it, regardless of feedback channel.

Uncovering drivers of Customer Goodwill & getting to the Root Cause

The transparency and visualizations created by Thematic meant their CX team could:

1. Easily review the themes in their customer feedback
2. Measure the impact of individual themes on the Customer Goodwill Score
3. Drill down into all the sub-themes to understand the meaning behind the data

This was important as they could understand, from the customer perspective, where they should be focusing. In this example, ‘Authentication’ was highlighted as an important theme. Their team could then look at the elements of the authentication customer journey which were creating friction:

With these insights, Atom bank conducted a Root Cause analysis. This gave them a deeper understanding of the data for decision-making. With all these credible customer insights, the team could prioritise the app features they knew would have the most impact.

Atom bank's Results after acting on Thematic Insights

Working with Thematic, Atom bank transformed their banking experience - based on what mattered most to their customers. Equally, they were able to track the impact of individual CX improvements. Everything is measurable - and they now have an industry-leading VoC program.

Deeper and accurate customer insights to drive continuous improvement.

The proof?

By understanding how to improve all the customer journeys within their app, Atom bank achieved:

• An improved app store rating
• Reduced customer contact required
• Increased customer advocacy
• Shortened customer journeys
• Improved UX, where it mattered most to the user
• Reduced costs, so they could grow without the operating costs growing with them
• Contact centre failure demand reduced by 30%!
• Trust pilot rating now 4.6/5

All these improvements have made Atom bank more competitive and the highest rated bank according to Trustpilot. They’re a great example of what’s possible once CX teams are able to make better sense of the customer feedback they’re receiving!