AXA Banque grows loyalty and offers new value-added services with e-mail and mobile text messaging.

Background
With in excess of 516,000 accounts, AXA Banque, a subsidiary of the AXA Group, is a leading online bank. AXA Banque sells its services directly over the Web and through a high-street network. AXA Banque also provides a 24-hour call centre and an online banking service has been operating since 1997.
For AXA Banque, e-mail is more than a just a simple workhorse and plays a pivotal role in customer relationships. Every month, over 20,000 inbound e-mails from customers and prospects are handled.

Context
AXA Banque is upfront about its market positioning: “We're a multi-channel bank.” For this reason, careful customer-relationship management is a priority. At AXA Banque, the CRM system was historically based on custom, internal developments, operating in conjunction with industry-standard back-office software and with trading and mortgage management applications.
1997 marked the start of a content-based Web policy. Content was designed to be sent to customers by e-mail. For the first phase of this project, management at AXA Banque decided to use a bulk e-mail tool. However, this tool rapidly showed its limitations in terms of sizing and functionality. No personalisation, tracking or reporting functionality was available, and many operations, such as list management had to be performed by hand. Marketing teams were also reliant on constant IT support.

Challenge
As of 2001, AXA Banque was starting to understand that e-mail and text messaging were becoming mass media in their own rights: At this time, almost 85% of its customers had an e-mail address, providing a new and inexpensive marketing communications channel.
The multi-channel concept started to come into clear focus: “Operational Marketing had the task of finding a solution to enable us to do with e-mail what we were already capable of doing via direct mail and the telephone,” explains Cyril Moiroud, Marketing Manager at AXA Banque.
“We needed to roll out targeted, real-time and reactive communication solutions for the entire customer base,” says Moiroud. “Importantly, we also had to be sure of having control mechanisms to fine-tune customer and prospect marketing pressure.”
That year, AXA Banque started its search for an account-alert solution with e-mail and text messaging functionality and invited proposals from a number of inbound and outbound e-mail vendors and integrators including Neolane, Silicomp, Akio and Kana. In late 1997, after extensive evaluations, AXA Banque selected Neolane.

The Neolane solution
Neolane stood apart from the competition: “Neolane was the only vendor offering a real software solution that was both configurable and rapidly operational,” underlines Moiroud. The implementation handles two line-of-business applications from one unified, graphical interface: All outbound e-mail for prospecting plus loyalty and account alerts via e-mail and text messaging. The full customer base can be addressed by the Neolane solution and sub-segments can be targeted for individual operations. Beyond simple database segmentation, template based campaigns can be used to personalise messages and to send variable content to the appropriate customers. From a technical standpoint, Neolane is integrated with the existing systems in full Web Services mode (via HTTP and XML).
Neolane was implemented in less than three months under the supervision of two project managers helped by the IT department at AXA Banque.

Benefits
Apart from the questions of usability and acceptance, a look at the benefits of the solution wouldn't be complete without looking at key figures: “Our loyalty e-mails are opened by 80% of our customers and from this we achieve a 5 to 10% conversion rate,” explains Moiroud.
Nicolas Serre, IT project manager at AXA Banque, on the other hand is keen to stress the total volumes handled: “Much of our competition just spray and pray. We are different. Our focused campaigns emphasise quality. We only send 3,000 to 10,000 text messages per month and around 50,000 to 150,000 e-mails per month-rarely more.”
The director of information systems at AXA Banque, Eric Lambert, also expresses his full satisfaction: “The sign of success for this project is that since it was implemented, I never get to hear about Neolane! It does what we want it to do and more.”
There are currently ten regular users with an increase in numbers planned to manage additional projects such as newsletters and reporting. For AXA Banque, the investment in Neolane paid for itself in less than 14 months-licence and installation included. This was an improvement on the initial business plan, since a new revenue stream was created through winning paid subscriptions to e-mail and text alerts.

Future plans
“We are getting ready to introduce new information services for our customers such as newsletters and we are now starting to use Neolane to communicate with our own account managers internally,” details Moiroud. The IT department is also finding more reasons to like Neolane, as Serre puts it, “we're starting to use stuff like text alerts for operational purposes such as monitoring the status of the system.”

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