Tableau Cloud helps Yorkshire Building Society achieve record rate of customer retention

Yorkshire Building Society is bucking the trend. As competitors increasingly turn their back on retail branches in favour of digital channels, this leading society is investing in a hybrid physical and digital model to deliver a differentiated and rewarding customer experience. 

Tableau Cloud provides the ‘purposeful analytics’ to power this strategy. Branch and area managers use the agile visual analytics to explore every facet of branch performance. With everyone now sharing one common dashboard view of branch performance, the Society’s Director of Retail Distribution believes the organisation is experiencing, “the highest rate of customer retention we have ever seen.”

Yorkshire Building Society is one of the UK’s largest and most successful building societies with more than 230 branches and local agencies across the country. The Society has more than £45 billion in assets and employs 3,000 people. 

The Society believes wholeheartedly in the future of face-to-face service. Indeed, it has more outlets than most comparably sized competitors. Over the longer term, the Society will also look to expand its network into new towns and cities where there is customer demand but where the Society currently has no presence.

However, a branch infrastructure comes at a cost. Yorkshire Building Society needs timely, accurate and complete intelligence to ensure every branch is operating efficiently, offering the financial services customers need, and delivering an optimal customer experience. 

Until recently however, those data insights were locked away in separate, fragmented systems and processes, making it harder for people to make agile, trusted decisions. Jonathan Wager, BIS Insight Manager explains, “We had a ‘cottage industry’ of different business intelligence solutions, which resulted in multiple versions of the truth. Our aim was to support ‘purposeful analytics’ at the Society by using a single source of trusted data and the power of interactive data visualization to make strategic branch decisions.”

This is where Tableau comes in. Yorkshire Building Society standardised on the Tableau visual analytics platform, with branch managers, retail managers and area managers all now connected to the same, shared, single view of data. It empowers users to ask and answer their own questions and helps users gain deep insights without compromising speed.

Jonathan again: “Before Tableau, branch managers were somewhat ‘in the dark’ about branch performance. They were several steps removed from the data. Using self-service analytics, they have a visual representation of key KPIs and they can quickly monitor performance opportunities.”

This view is echoed by Gary Fowler, Director of Retail Distribution. “In the past, if you asked 100 managers how they were performing, you would get 100 different answers. Now we can see instantly how the business is performing. Tableau has sparked their curiosity in analytics. People are interested to know what’s happening in each branch. Armed with these immediate insights, we are more agile and more informed as an organisation.”

Just as remarkably, the vast majority of users do not have ‘data’ in their job title. These are first and foremost financial services managers – not data scientists. “Tableau puts people first. It’s intuitive, visual and immensely popular with the teams. That ease of use has changed people’s relationship with data. A data culture is emerging, where every decision is based on evidence not intuition,” says Jonathan.

Tableau is the tool of choice for branch analytics. Dashboards underpin everything from branch insights, underwriting service delivery and product performance analysis, to customer service analysis, mortgage collections, and digital channel analysis. “Our branch managers are light years ahead of where they were, in terms of how they use data,” says Gary.  

For example, a manager can review how customers are using the branch through the shared analytics providing informed insight into customer footfall, the type of enquiries, volume of financial transactions, and other processes, thereby determining how the branch can operate to ensure it provides optimal member value.

Teams can also compare inter-branch performance. Jonathan explains, “If two branches have a similar profile, but one is outperforming the other, we can look at the outliers for that discrepancy. Do we need to adjust the product portfolio at the branch? Is more training needed? We are making data-driven decisions like these every day using Tableau.” 

A scatter-based comparative view also shows branch managers how they rank against other branches, on measures such as the number of new accounts opened or the average balance held per customer. According to Gary, “This purposeful analytics is a key enabler in helping the Society support a healthy, hybrid digital and physical infrastructure. We are experiencing the highest customer retention we have ever seen – and Tableau is instrumental in achieving high levels of customer satisfaction and retention.”

Yorkshire Building Society is different to a bank. With no shareholders to answer to, the focus is predominantly on members’ needs. Every penny spent as a society is members’ money – and Tableau is helping to ensure that money is spent wisely, optimising branch performance. Jonathan concludes, “For us, as a building society, it means delivering three central ambitions: helping people to have a place to call home and helping them towards greater financial wellbeing, whilst creating long-term value for our members.”