If you were a manager at Royal Bank of Scotland, what steps would you have taken to encourage front-line staff to adopt the new data-driven approach to supporting customer service? What challenges would Royal Bank of Scotland faced when first trying to make use of its data assets in innovative ways?

As the Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) reformed its business practices following the global financial crisis (GFC), senior executives decided on a strategy that would refocus its approach to engaging customers in its retail branches. For years, the business had encouraged employees to focus on sales opportunities - offering new services, insurance, investment packages, etc. to improve the bank's revenues. Recognising that trust between bank and customer had been damaged in the wake of the GFC, the RBS knew it had to improve its relationships with customers, and embarked on a strategy to focus on providing exceptional customer service by tailoring its interactions to individual customers. For a bank as large as RBS, this was a daunting task - how could the bank know every customer at a personal level? The RBS defined its approach as Personology - an aim to better understand their customers and support their needs. While the day-to-day tasks of staff didn't change much, the ways in which staff were asked to engage with customers became distinctly personal. The bank was able to tap into the extensive data sets they had developed over time for their customers (banking and spending habits, travel locations, investments and loan conditions, and personal information) to identify opportunities for personalising each customer's experience with the bank. For example, simple changes included customers being greeted with 'Happy birthday' if attending a bank teller on their birthday, and more intricate changes included analysing customer transactions to identify when a customer was paying twice for a particular service - for example, if a customer was paying for insurance but the same type of insurance was already provided to the customer as part of a packaged loan from the bank, the bank would call the customer letting them know that they were double-insured. In almost every case, the customer would cancel the competitor's insurance plan in preference of the RBS product being provided. This new personalised approach required significant investment in data handling, analysis, and use (in pushing prompts to front-line staff). and was met by reluctance of staff to shift away from their traditional approaches to working. The RBS management team had to work hard to ensure that staff knew why the organisation was shifting its approach, how it would work, and the benefits that using data to prompt specific conversations with customers could bring to the company. Once the staff were comfortable with the new data-driven approach to supporting customer service, front-line employees became a valuable source of feedback and ideas for new additional opportunities to improve customer experience and loyalty. The transition to a data-supported customer service approach has allowed RBS to place customer service, trust and advocacy at the centre of the organisation's ambitions.