How Legal & General Retail connected thousands of data points to better understand customers, and drive more personalised experiences

Challenge:

Legal and General Retail had the challenge of connecting disparate sources of data to be able to communicate with customers on an individual level, whilst protecting their privacy and data.

Solution:

Legal and General integrated the Tealium Customer Data Platform (CDP) with Legal & General Retail’s marketing data zone and single customer view to connect and leverage thousands of data points and better understand the needs of customers.

Results:

Established in 1836, Legal & General is one of the UK’s leading financial services groups. The Legal & General Retail division has around 12 million policyholders and workplace members, delivering a diverse range of financial products and services across savings, protection, mortgages, retirement solutions, life insurance and pensions.

Operating in a highly regulated market and with a focus on protecting customer privacy, prior to introducing Tealium AudienceStream, the anonymity of website visitors meant that Legal & General Retail could not treat customers as individuals. This limited Legal & General Retail to creating communications or experiences based on the expected target audience. Essentially this amounted to optimising based on averages and provided little scope for treating customers as individuals or tailoring product offerings to their personal needs.

Gareth Jones, Senior Product Developer (Marketing Technology), Legal & General Retail, said “As a trusted financial services brand, our customers do not expect to have to trawl through our website looking for the right products and services. Partnering with Tealium has helped us to raise our personalisation game, and offer the right products, to the right customers, at the right time. We now have the means to treat customers as individuals and the ability to enrich our existing data and accurately predict behaviour and needs. This is a huge advantage in a competitive market and is already yielding impressive commercial results”

Before introducing Tealium’s CDP, Legal & General Retail held customer data in multiple silos. Whilst data was securely stored, it was not connected in a way that would provide valuable insight into customer behaviour or opportunities for personalisation. This was akin to having all the ingredients to make a cake but no means of mixing them together.

Combining Tealium’s CDP with Legal & General’s marketing data zone and its single customer view has created the ability to leverage thousands of data points and generate a much richer understanding of the needs and behaviour of customers. This structure allows Legal & General Retail to be a “good active listener”. A simple value exchange – where a customer may be asked for a small amount of personal information such as date of birth, postcode, and email address – enables Legal & General Retail to create individual customer profiles.

Using the customer profile as a starting point, the business is able to run machine learning models to predict customer needs and curate differentiated experiences, enhancing the customer journey and fuelling a drive to more responsive and personalised communications. In turn, this has led to better commercial outcomes for the business. 

The introduction of Tealium’s Customer Data Platform has been a catalyst for Legal & General Retail’s digital transformation journey and an important step in achieving its ambition of becoming a business that is focused on data, technology and customer experience.

Legal & General Retail is now equipped with a fit-for-purpose platform that is capable of ingesting and acting on new data sources, channels and partners, whilst respecting the privacy of customers. Internally, this has enabled Legal & General Retail to create an iterative learning loop and make continuous advances in predicting customer behaviour and delivering more personalised experiences.

“Installing Tealium’s CDP was a huge leap in our digital transformation journey. Not only have we acquired a powerful, agile technology that will fuel our drive to becoming a data-driven, customer experience-focused business, we’ve gained a trusted partner to test, learn and improve the way we communicate with our customers. We now have a robust and flexible engine that allows us to continuously add more data sources and channels, and make continuous improvements to our customer experience” James O’Keefe, Marketing Technology Director, Legal & General

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