Standard Life’s Mary Harper Investing Big In Personal Relationships

The head of customer and digital marketing at the U.K. savings firm recognises the urgency to respond directly to customers’ needs and how to do it at scale.

Investment company Standard Life is one of the U.K.’s largest and most established pension providers. Headquartered in Scotland, with operations globally, the company has around 4.5 million customers and clients. In the U.K, many of its customers connect with Standard Life indirectly via company pension schemes.

In the past three years, the U.K. business has set about growing relationships with its end-customers, a task overseen by Mary Harper, head of customer and digital marketing, who recently described this journey to CMO.com. We began by asking her to explain her role at Standard Life.

Harper: We’re a multichannel distribution business using both B2B and B2C channels. My role covers all of the marketing and digital platforms and engagement of our end-customer—the people whose money we look after. That includes a number of direct customers and those who come through our workplace channel as members of their company pension scheme.

We work with their employers who are our clients too, but changing trends in technology, the uptake of digital channels, greater appetite for self-service, and some market-changing regulation meant we had to respond more directly to the needs of scheme members as well.

The only way to engage directly at scale was through digital means. It’s a journey we started over three years ago and that’s where we had to focus first. When it came to customer engagement, we didn’t have a particularly robust direct-to-consumer digital platform or digital capability to build on at that point.

CMO.com: What lessons have you learnt from that digital-first approach and the new way of working for the business?

Harper: Firstly, we knew we had to be customer-driven in how we engage with people. A lot of our customers were “dormant,” in that they had our product and policy, but they didn’t necessarily know we existed—they just knew they were members of their company pension scheme arranged by their employer. They weren’t expecting to hear from us, so although they were existing customers, we had to treat them as if they had to be acquired.

The beginning of the job was to introduce ourselves and gain permission to form a direct relationship with them. Initially, we found that some scheme members had forgotten they were scheme members—they had, perhaps, moved job and joined a new company pension scheme. As a result, some left because they were actively investing elsewhere. The lesson there was that you have to hold your nerve and adapt your approach to better engage with the customers who stay, and demonstrate real value to customers who might be at risk of leaving.

We’re continuously building out the range of customers who are happy to be engaged by us, and we have many customers who are now much more open and willing to co-create, to the extent that we consider them part of the team. We often focus on customers who’ve had experiences that hadn’t met their expectations and draw them into the process to see how they can help us make things better. It’s great to have a customer who’s had a good experience talk about us, but we feel that the value of co-creating is with less satisfied customers so we can improve engagement for all.

CMO.com: Can you give some examples of the techniques you’ve used to co-create with customers?

Harper: We use face-to-face and digital. For example, we run a small disruption lab, where we look at our biggest business challenges and opportunities, and at how we could change that but still land happily with customers so it doesn’t feel too out of place.

About six months ago, we noticed a customer who was writing actively about his experience on social media, so we invited him to be part of the process and our team. We talked to him, shared our designs, and allowed him to experiment and play with various functions. Our approach was close and personal, asking customers not just what they want but how they feel.

We created what was effectively a piece of cognitive technology, which acts as a digital support to customers. It’s all in beta. After being involved in the process, the customer was very supportive of our work. Other things we do are more technology-based, such as multi-page testing to see which versions work best and are the most user-friendly. We also look at how customers navigate through our different real estate and use that interaction data to inform our designs and make them better.

There’s a myriad of other techniques, a lot of them more data and technology-driven, including multivariate testing. We try to keep it diverse so we’re not reliant on just one technique or social data only.

CMO.com: What’s the focus for you now that you’ve moving into a state of maturity in digital?

Harper: I never feel we’ve got it licked, we have to keep up the pace and lead. The stuff we call “brilliant basics” is the foundation of what we have to do to support our customers’ priorities and make sure there’s very little they can’t do online.

Our approach is about being digitally enabled, rather than necessarily digital first. We are omnichannel and are now focusing on better integration between digital, phone, and the other channels we use. It’s ensuring there is a fulfilling and informative experience that guides customers through their financial life and all their long-term savings goals, so we plan the journey from initial engagement through to functional transactions and servicing, developing relationships over the long term.

We’re also looking at how we communicate with customers using a personalised, push-pull marketing perspective, changing tack from the traditional approach of, perhaps, three larger, generic campaigns a year. We’ve invested in technology to ensure our communications are based on customer data, behaviour, interactions, and preferences and have started to build that out and diversify our channels and touch points. We’ve essentially created an ecosystem that replicates our customer footprint in the digital space, so we are where they expect us to be.

CMO.com: How have you organised the marketing function?

Harper: We have a matrix structure, which is a mix of functional and agile marketing. The functions—marketing strategy, direct marketing, digital marketing, content, UX and design, and innovation—work well on their own but are stronger when they’re cross-functional. We ask them to address particular business problems, such as how to support our customers over 50 who are thinking of retirement.

Every member of the team is trained in agile marketing methodology and design thinking. It allows us to think differently and be market-leading in what we produce.

CMO.com: And what kind of agency-partner relationships do you have?

Harper: As a big company, we have primary agencies, but, increasingly, we’re also working with smaller, more agile startups. They’re nimble and can deliver at speed, but we can also learn a lot from them as they challenge us. We’re constantly evolving how it looks to have competitive advantage from a relationship perspective and from an organisation and way-of-working perspective.

We have some fast competitive followers on our heels, so we’re constantly looking at the next space of sustaining competitive advantage, whether that’s our agency mix, our relationship mix, how we work, or our innovation team. We must always keep a few steps ahead and ensure that our creative approach remains difficult to replicate.

CMO.com: What do you see as the next big challenge in communications for the business?

Harper: A big challenge for us in the U.K. is the level of change in regulation that’s happening in the industry, which can cause uncertainty and mean that customers mistrust the industry and savings as a whole. We also want to foster a greater culture of savings in the U.K. that encourages more people to approach their financial lives proactively, so saving for the future moves up the list of priorities.

For us and our peers in financial services, instilling that mindset is a challenge, but also a big opportunity. We analyse behavioural economics and “nudge” projects to understand how to connect with people and encourage them to feel good about taking action for their financial futures. It’s not an easy task, but it’s a really fascinating journey working out how to get that right for people.