Can data alone drive and improve user experience? Certainly not. Data highlights critical situations and provides a solid foundation for launching improvement programs. However, all other activities must be carried out by people and align with a business’ sensibilities.

At the 2023 CX Circle event, UniCredit demonstrated how a customer experience platform like Contentsquare empowers their Digital Sales & Engagement Team to identify, interpret, and resolve critical issues in the purchasing process. This anecdote highlighted the importance of creating cohesion between information and technology.

Access to accurate and meaningful data is crucial for improving awareness of CX issues across different teams and at the management level. It facilitates the implementation of solutions designed to increase customer satisfaction and reduce churn.

UniCredit is among Italy’s leading banking groups. It serves 7 million users, 4 million of whom are active digital users.

UniCredit has been collaborating with BitBang for over 12 years across the entire digital data pipeline — from implementing analytics tools to extracting insights.

BitBang stands out for its propensity to combine technical and business expertise and ability to facilitate a synergistic interaction between these two areas. This type of contribution becomes crucial when extracted data insights need to be shared with various group stakeholders. It highlights the important aspects of each role and allows for an effective and measurable action plan to be implemented.

Digital service users are no longer just digital addicts but also represent a fluid and diverse audience that has various expectations and needs. Fierce market competition, stringent regulations, and precise approval processes paint the extremely complex picture that digital teams face when operating in the banking sector.

Data is the key to navigating this environment in an informed and agile manner. Data management, however, is not without challenges. Data is often co-owned by business and IT, which can delay its processing time.

The digital team needs to activate reliable processes for collecting and interpreting user experience data, identifying improvement areas, defining intervention areas, pinpointing objectives, and determining how and why to act. For this purpose, it is essential to translate the insights provided by tools and data analytics into business information that is assessable by management. It must also be convincing enough to justify any interventions on completed projects, which may require several approval steps on multiple fronts.

In the face of unexpected navigational phenomena, such as drop-offs in the user journey during a process, Contentsquare allows one to gather insights, find an explanation, and to reason further. When one has the ability to confidently review browsing sessions while also respecting privacy regulations, it allows him or to identify pain points that are otherwise difficult to imagine for a team that has already worked to make sure the user experience is as seamless as possible.

In one case, for example, it was possible to prove that an innovative feature (i.e., card personalization) introduced to respond to a market trend was misleading customers, even if it was appreciated by some. A seemingly minimal intervention in the navigation flow made it possible to maintain the product feature’s value, while simultaneously removing friction from uninterested users. This resulted in a 4% CTR increase.

These types of interventions are carried out by the digital team in a continuous improvement cycle, which always includes A/B testing, reporting, and impact assessments. This is the only way the team can ensure that it is correctly assessing priorities and bringing value to the business by increasing digital sales, increasing customer engagement, and optimizing the sales funnel.

The adoption and integration of Contentsquare allows BitBang to support UniCredit in identifying and enhancing possible optimizations in sales flows. Contentsquare also enables them to use advanced analytics that can extract real value from data, uncover why consumers make certain choices, and improve their digital properties experience — thus ensuring their full satisfaction.

Understanding users and their needs for a company like UniCredit is inevitably an ongoing activity that requires them to be constantly attentive and ready to activate and verify changes that can bring a noticeable improvement to the customer’s experience.

The challenge in the upcoming period will primarily be to consistently stick close to customers on the most appropriate channel. This will allow them to interpret expectations and usage habits that change regularly.

Monica Del Naja

The challenges are dictated by an increasingly fluid environment characterized by new players and where digital pervades the entire business. In addition, customer expectations are high and extremely diverse. In this context, the objective was to improve customer engagement and sales performance in compliance with industry regulations, by interpreting objective data and interacting with various customer intelligence, DX, and other teams.

Monica Del Naja

Head of Digital Sales and Engagement, UniCredit