Newsletters. Emails. Promotions. All these marketing activities are far more powerful when they are tailored to an individual customer’s needs.

We talked to Russell Fisher, Head of Customer and Digital Strategy at Zurich UK, about how he is making pensions more relevant and more interesting for customers by taking a personal approach.

Why does personalisation matter?

If you’re selling holidays, haircuts, or hamburgers, people will come to you. If you’re trying to educate people on their financial futures, you need to put in a lot more effort!Only about 20% of the UK population are actively engaged in managing their financial futures, but with people living longer and UK legislation changing, more responsibility is being pushed on the individual.

Financial jargon has been a major barrier for people in the past; we want to put an end to that. We wanted to make it easier and more interesting for people to get involved, and to do that, we needed to make it personal. 

So how did you add a personal touch to pensions? 

We’ve launched an entirely new financial services platform, Zurich FutureYou, which provides greater transparency and greater control. Although, it’s primarily a self-service platform, we still want people to feel supported. We have a team of ‘navigators’ who help users get the best from FutureYou by responding to queries and sharing knowledge articles.

When a customer initiates a web chat, we know who they are straight away thanks to Service Cloud. We can also see how they’ve interacted with us in the past and any issues they’ve had.

And what about marketing content and customer communications? 

We send personalised newsletters every month with links to articles that are relevant to a customer’s life stage and recent events within their network of friends and family. It’s still early days, but we’re already getting great click-through rates.

With Marketing Cloud, we can create and test content quickly. Instead of spending weeks on customer newsletters, the marketing team can now send out timely emails in hours, and see the results immediately. If something’s not working, we can quickly change it so we’re not wasting time or money.

How does social fit with your personalised approach?  

We see social as essential for our growth, so we’re aggressively expanding our social presence at the moment. We’re starting to out with social listening, and will eventually offer customer support via social channels. Financial services providers traditionally engage with customers by telephone, but studies show that it is the least popular channel for digital customers.

We’re taking our lead from industries such as retail to rethink customer engagement. 

What would be your top tips for creating a more personalised customer journey?

It all has to start with understanding. Understanding who your customers are and what matters to them and understanding what you are and what you can do for your customers.

We know that Zurich FutureYou may not be right for everyone, and that’s ok, but we also know that for our target customers our experience can be a great start to help them take more control of their financial future. As our customers interact more with us we will learn more about them and that will help us tailor their engagement to make their experience increasingly personal to them.

By putting personalisation at the heart of its Zurich FutureYou offering, the company has been able to reach a whole new set of customers – and pioneer a whole new approach to financial services. Read the full success story to learn more about how Zurich is creating unique experiences and journeys for thousands of customers across the UK.