Greater Bank increases page views by 238.6% with personalisation

Greater Bank is an Australian customer-owned bank and mutual financial institution with headquarters in Newcastle, New South Wales. Specializing in financial services for over 70 years, Greater Bank has 260,000 customers and over $7 billion in assets under management.

Project objective

Greater Bank is in the process of rolling out a major digital transformation in the form of a market-leading mobile app and online banking platform for its customers. Once complete, the innovative solution will re-invent the online banking and mobile app experience for users.  

As part of the process, Greater Bank decided it would concurrently replace its website Content Management System (CMS) and rebuild the customer website and mobile app. This was to enable the creation of consistent experiences from the website into online banking, including the mobile app. The new CMS would improve workflow and efficiency, such as the ability to preview website content before going live, assign responsibility and control of content, and provide a streamlined production process. The outcome eradicated an estimated 920 wasted hours a year due to improved workflow alone. 

Additionally, Greater Bank wanted to improve the digital customer experience and provide bespoke and personalized content, via content recommendations and personalization for customers.  

The solution

After an extensive sourcing process, Greater Bank and their digital partner Fusion selected Optimizely’s platform as the best solution.  

Optimizely’s Content Cloud was one of the very few solutions that had the ability to execute all of Greater Bank’s requirements. It also enabled the implementation of personalization features across digital assets, and Greater Bank appreciated how their technology and IT teams would easily be able to use those features. 

Powered by AI learning capabilities, Optimizely's platform is able to deliver real-time content recommendations to users, along with a personalized journey as they navigate through the website or mobile app. For example, users visiting the website today that happen to be researching home loans, would be greeted by relevant products and content if they returned to the website tomorrow and received a completely personalized home loan experience.  

The results  

Optimizely’s platform along with Fusion’s experience in human centered design has helped Greater Bank create a market-leading solution for its customers. The ultimate measure of the success achieved from the project was evident on the day the solution went live; the bank’s contact center didn’t receive a single call, nor did the branch experience walk-ins about the new website – the solution was so intuitive and user friendly that customers were able to quickly and easily self-serve.  

Two of the major benefits the bank is experiencing since adopting the Optimizely solution are the advancements in content recommendations, as well as the inbuilt personalization for delivering content to its customers. Also, solving other issues around workflow and production pain points. 

Due to the implementation of Optimizely, various teams across the business are now benefiting from a number of improvements. Content recommendations, content personalization, and the ability to update the website in real-time have resulted in the business meeting all of its pre-project objectives. 

“Optimizely is a solution that’s powerful enough to enable and support such a huge transformation, but simple enough to be easily used by the whole team,” said Craig Newham, Group Executive Sales Marketing & Distribution at Greater Bank. “Both the Optimizely and Fusion teams have helped make all this possible, and because of that, we have seen incredible outcomes at Greater Bank”.  

As a key contributor to this transformation project, Optimizely’s solution partner, Fusion has helped Greater Bank continue their mission to put the customer first. 

“In the highly regulated industry of Financial Services, it’s extremely difficult to differentiate parity products. Delivering a compelling customer experience is the only way to create a sustainable competitive advantage. How do you achieve this outcome when the majority of customer interactions are via digital channels?” said Damien Mair, Founder and Director at Fusion. 

“Simple. You personalize the digital experience. For over six months, Fusion worked intimately with the Greater Bank team, to strategize, design and implement a highly personalized ‘digital branch’ built upon the foundations of the Optimizely platform. Taking advantage of Optimizely’s experimentation and content recommendation tools, Greater Banks’ hyper-personalized digital experience is continually delivering outstanding business results. There is a big pay-off to being digitally personable”.  

Fusion was able to provide improved speed to market for Greater Bank by using their Digital Branch Product, powered by Optimizely. Working alongside the Greater Bank and Optimizely teams, Fusion reached a production deploy in just three months. In addition, Fusion integrated Optimizely’s Content Recommendations product that has provided additional value for Greater Bank and their members. 

“Greater Bank has a great team that understands and anticipates the digital needs of their members. Their passion, experience and collaboration helped Fusion deliver an experience their members love,” said Mair. 

The metrics 

Since launch, the Greater Bank team has been able to easily and successfully launch a dozen personalization experiments via the Optimizely platform, including the imminent full personalization of the bank’s homepage.  

Since launch, the Greater Bank website's home loans section experienced an increase of 167% in page views. The Savings Account content also saw an increase of 465% in page views due to the personalization and content recommendations provided by Optimizely. The overall results suggest a page view increase of 238.6% when comparing content recommendations that are not personalized vs. personalized recommendations. 

*For period 27 April 2021 (Launch date) to 27 September 2021