OTP Bank Romania enhances customer experience through Tableau

This story was originally published by our Tableau Premium partner in Romania, btProvider. The original white paper can be found here. 

OTP Bank Romania, a subsidiary of OTP Group, is an integrated and self-financed provider of financial services in Romania.  When the pandemic started, the international health crisis changed customer behaviour and influenced the overall activities of most industries in the world economy. The banking sector faced many challenges that tested its resilience, adaptation capacity and its power to make real-time changes.

At OTP Bank Romania, digitalisation and data analysis played a major role in the process of understanding the impact of the pandemic on customers. Specialists from OTP problematised what kind of effects the pandemic would have on the economy and how customers would react in these challenging times. 

OTP Bank Romania started their digital transformation well before the pandemic began. This initiative included a lot of processes to further improve the customer experience, internal efficiencies and to allow employees to interact much more with customers. 

“OTP Bank Romania started the digital transformation journey about two years ago, putting the customer at the centre of everything we do,” says Constantin Mares, Deputy Chief Executive Officer, Digital Division, at OTP Bank Romania. “Therefore, we tried to bring everything that is top-notch experience and technology when it comes to our customers.” 

Most significantly, they also started an agile transformation in changing and adjusting the way of everyday work.

“Before working from home, we gathered at a table, looked at the data, reports, analytics, discussed them and explained the terms,” says Cristian Popa, CRM Manager at OTP Bank Romania. “After working from home, the data had to speak for itself, and Tableau helped in this process.” 

It’s imperative that financial services institutions have a solid analytics infrastructure that can handle data and automation at scale. With Tableau, any business team can use visual analytics to ask additional questions and fully explore the data, instead of merely crunching the numbers. 

Customers expect banks to connect all the dots and deliver omni-channel experiences that are seamless, personalized, and insightful. Whether customers visit branch locations or engage on mobile apps, it’s essential that at enterprise level, a bank fully understands, anticipates, and serves their needs. 

OTP Bank overcame the challenges embedded in the concept of big data manipulation by using Tableau, which provided them with a real-time, dynamic self-service visual analytics platform. 

The management team decided in January 2020 to implement Tableau with the help of data specialists from btProvider. After only 6 months, in June 2020 the deployment extended within the organisation. 

“btProvider specialists managed in a short period to create and automate a dashboard that we are following on a monthly basis and now, with zero coding skills I can personalise these reports and follow up with more than 100 KPIs for our transformational program in OTP Bank,” says Bogdan Chiriac, Portfolio Manager at OTP Bank. 

In the above mentioned example, 6 people were working on approximately 100 KPIs on a monthly basis: dragging things into PowerPoint, crunching the data and trying to understand it. After implementing Tableau, just one 1 person now spends a maximum of 2-3 hours per month, doing all 100 KPIs, which are easy to access and understand, as well as extremely useful for those who access them. 

Before using Tableau, most of the reports delivered by  the bank’s departments, as well as the data processing required to produce these reports, were done manually. This took exponentially longer to create these reports and there was an increased focus on the actual delivery, rather than spending time on actually analysing and explaining the results and subsequently taking timely and appropriate actions and making decisions. 

So far, 169 people in OTP Bank Romania use Tableau, and above 120 are working in various branches and the other users operate at the OTPs headquarters, as the initial push was to service the areas with the highest informational gap. 

OTP Bank puts a lot of emphasis on the continuous development of a structured data culture in the company. They are constantly upgrading their processes and they started to see more and more what else they could do with their data. The pandemic accelerated the adoption process of a true data culture at OTP Bank. They are focusing on strategic partnerships for continued innovation to drive an even better customer experience. 

Today, as a result of the implementation and adoption of Tableau, the company aims to gain as much customer insight as possible at this moment in their journey, without having to inconvenience customers by asking the same questions again and again. Using Tableau, they are better prepared to quickly find the required answers, an aspect that provides a highly valuable competitive advantage in the Romanian banking sector. The journey is not over yet, as more and more areas from the bank move towards Tableau usage.

Data visualisation empowered them to make faster decisions, to navigate through data with ease and to observe and analyses the stories that data tells with curiosity. 

“Nowadays, navigating a journey to a data-driven organisation requires the willingness to adapt to new challenges, requires being objective-oriented, and requires massive support from the entire organisation on all levels,” says Alex Stancescu, Head of Analytics at btProvider. “OTP Bank Romania, managed to inoculate all these in the company’s DNA.”