Bank of the Philippine Islands

Business Challenge

The BPI Market Research & Competitive Intelligence (MRCI) team was tasked with becoming  a wide-ranging custom research support for teams across the business, focused on customer experience, growth, and innovation. Over recent years the organization had prioritized customer-obsession as a prominent business value and the MRCI team realized there was an opportunity to elevate and evolve their existing program to meet this new company mission. 

The team of 9 set out to become more ingrained with stakeholders and began to get a deeper understanding of how they could go beyond classic market research to support overarching strategy and inspire others through custom customer insights. 

Solution

In 2021, BPI launched their dedicated insight community including both BPI customers and others engaged in the financial services space. Since launch, the team has gone through an extensive education process with internal stakeholders to allow collaborators a chance to ask questions and fully understand the research team’s goals as well as how they could assist and support ongoing projects and long-term strategy. 

“Collaboration and partnership is critical to make sure our learnings land with stakeholders. People have specific ideas about research, we need to get in on their mindset. We take our team into meetings to communicate to these groups so they see where insights can help and to make sure we are delivering results they can understand and action” says Bea Dy, Head of MRCI. 

The BPI community is asked to provide feedback on a variety of topics from simple tagline testing to UX and product co-creation studies. Consumer insights are shared with business groups of various functions across the business including marketing, product, segment, and platform teams—around 20 groups now tap on the MRCI team to perform studies for both instant actionable feedback and broad trend analysis.

Through the community, BPI has expanded their custom insights offering to cover:

• Communications Testing: taglines, marketing messaging, and advertisements
• Customer Experience: mapped customer journeys, NPS studies, experience improvement initiatives
• Customer Pulses: consumer behavior, attitude, trend analysis 
• Innovative UX testing
• Recruitment for in-depth and follow-up studies
• Competitive intelligence research

Results

With every passing year, the goals of the MRCI team get bigger and the value of the program continues to grow. The increased speed to actionable insights and quality of the feedback has lifted the team to not only continue to provide custom work but also support other ongoing studies with consistently updated data.

In 2023, consumer insights informed a variety of projects and streamlined workflows to ensure customer-centricity. From this, BPI launched the “Do More with BPI” campaign, led by a customer-informed communication strategy and they prioritized and aligned business groups on customer experience efforts. Through customer pulse surveys they were also able to develop a strong communication plan to manage emergent PR needs.

Backing up other studies and providing consistent insights and results to support ongoing business strategy has also been a key goal of the research team. Through matching community insights with external data and company action plans the team is actively supporting the bank’s customer-obsession principle.

In just one year, the team has increased their number of stakeholders to 20 groups, a testament to how insights have generated value to business groups served, and more than doubled their activities per month. Internally, the Online Communities Program was a finalist for the BPI Excellence Awards recognizing innovative and valued work across the entire business.

Most importantly, the MRCI team knows they are truly bringing more value to their customers as a trusted financial resource. The team shares back results of feedback with the community but also puts a lot of effort into sharing stories, savings tips, and financial resources for their members, showcasing their dedication to their customer-obsessed mission.