We’re back with another customer spotlight! We love catching up with our power users to learn about the magic they create with Amperity and share the amazing things they do to inspire others.
François in five:
Assistant Vice President (AVP) & Data Scientist at First Hawaiian Bank
Works with several teams, concentrating on marketing analytics and delivery
Believes a CDP is essential to successful digital transformation
Uses Amperity to quantify the halo effect of marketing campaigns, e.g. keeping track of any product or service acquired by a customer after a banker calls them
Has lived in Hawaii for 20 years and loves surfing and running
What are you responsible for as an AVP & Data Scientist?
I manage a team of data scientists at First Hawaiian Bank, the second oldest bank west of the Mississippi. We’re primarily focused on marketing analytics and their delivery.
What teams do you work with or support? What does this entail?
I work with product managers who are responsible for loans, credit cards, etc., the omnichannel team who handle promotions, the marketing communications team for our ads, other data analytics teams, and the Bank Secrecy Act (BSA) team who look out for any financial fraud.
Our omnichannel team is responsible for direct mail and email. Most importantly, they manage the number of calls and number of leads being sent to bankers.
Describe your role in three words without using your title:
Inspiring, inclusive, and insightful!
Has your use of Amperity changed how you get work done?
Prior to Amperity our data was in bad shape, and it was difficult for our market intelligence teams to model or easily manipulate it, so it was challenging to automate segmentation and make updates in a timely manner. Teams were spending too much time trying to access and manage the data. We had to constantly start from scratch and we lacked consistency.
With Amperity, we have more freedom to explore. We’ve gone from being order takers to being the artist painting a picture. It’s allowed us to invest in our curiosity more and increase our speed.
What did the teams do when they didn’t have access to the data? And has the increase in speed to data access changed anything?
Our product managers or decision makers had such difficulty accessing the data that they couldn’t afford to use it — they had to rely on their gut to make decisions instead. We wanted to democratize the data to free that curiosity and really empower them to spend the time to look at the data and make data-driven decisions.
On the more technical side, most of our time before was spent having to connect all the data together every time. Now, we can leverage the Amperity platform right away and pull customer lists way more efficiently than before. So in this case, the ROI would be in terms of productivity and efficiency and, as mentioned earlier, the fact that we can now invest in curiosity.
"With Amperity, we have more freedom to explore. We’ve gone from being order takers to being the artist painting a picture. It’s allowed us to invest in our curiosity and increase our speed."
Can you talk a bit about the state of your data before Amperity?
Before Amperity all of our data was in very siloed systems. We’d call them the core systems for deposits, credit cards etc, and we’d link them with our customer number but we’d lose a lot of nuance in the process. Every time we wanted to connect that data, we would have to write everything from scratch.
In your own words, why is a CDP an essential part of banking strategy in 2021?
Like most companies, we are going through a digital transformation, so being able to connect all the dots, have a strong data foundation, and democratize the data are all essential components of that strategy. This has allowed us to change from a product-centric to a customer-centric approach.
Traditionally, we've been very product-centric: for example, we had a manager that focused on credit cards, and another manager that focused on mortgages. Now we have a platform that allows us to be customer-centric by giving us the option to see their full profile and offer them products we think they would enjoy based on their past behavior.
Do you use any BI tools for data visualization and dashboards?
First Hawaiian Bank has recently adopted Tableau as an enterprise solution. We’ve already used it alongside our Amperity data to build dashboards that show enrollment and activity on our website and mobile app. We’re also in the process of building automated campaign reports to have a visual indicator of how campaigns are performing and the impact of specific actions, eg. banking calls that may have an impact on our customer’s relationship with us.
How does the organization use the information from the dashboards and/or segments you create?
We’ve been able to quantify the halo effect of marketing campaigns. For instance, both our banker and marketing folks knew that bankers had great touchpoints with their clients, but nobody could quantitatively tell what exactly that impact was in terms of accounts opened and profit. With Amperity, we can easily take note of any product or service acquired by a customer after a banker called them. This has been extremely insightful and we can now map ROI on banker calls and set expectations for future initiatives.
In short, our marketing team is now able to visualize marketing campaign performance, and our product managers have more information to work with.
Were there certain activities that were hard to accomplish or took a lot of effort and time for your marketing team without a CDP?
Without the CDP, every time we needed a moderately complex analysis, we would have to start from the beginning — pull the data from the system, remember how to connect all that data together, audit the data... it took a lot of time. As a result, we’d only do those types of complex queries when there was a real need for them.
What’s the coolest thing you’ve been able to do with data?
Several months ago, we were invited to become DataGrid certified and train using the sandboxes on the operating platform! We were happily surprised by how much we can actually do, and how much power and control we had on those sandboxes.
What kinds of results have you seen with the work you’ve done with Amperity?
In regards to the tracking of banking calls earlier, we saw a 25% lift in additional accounts opened and were able to establish a baseline to compare future campaigns to.
Apart from being a data wizard at First Hawaiian Bank, what’s a hobby you love to do outside of work?
I’ve lived in Hawaii for 20 years, and love to surf and run. I try my best to be as goofy as life allows me to be. I generally try to make it out on the water at least once a week — see me in action in the video below!
Thank you François!
First Hawaiian Bank is a joint customer of Amperity and AWS.
Stay tuned for more customer spotlights! In the meantime, you can check out previous installments here.
