Metrobank: Enhanced marketing communications and significant cost efficiencies with Viber for Business

As one of the top three banks in the Philippines, Metrobank is a household name in the financial sector with a broad range of products, including retail banking, loans, credit cards, and insurance.

As part of its digital transformation journey the bank recognized the benefits of adopting a new digital messaging channel for marketing communications that was popular with their customers and offered advantages in terms of rich messaging functionality and cost savings.

Viber was identified as an important channel in the Philippine market due to its high penetration rate amongst urban professionals, and the range of features that it provides to enhance the customer experience.

For any highly regulated financial institution the increased character limit is an important consideration. Crafting an effective promotional message that clearly describes the proposition and includes both an effective call to action and all the required statutory information is extremely difficult with a 160-character limit, but easily achievable with Viber.

Operating In a strictly regulated industry and with multiple product-specific legacy systems within the organization, the challenge for Metrobank was to introduce Viber for Business without disrupting existing processes and with minimum additional work. To achieve this would require partnering with a technology vendor who could provide an automated and reliable integration with their existing Salesforce CRM system for the sending of messages.

The team at Metrobank evaluated several vendors that claimed to facilitate messaging through Viber for Business, both directly and via a Salesforce integration. We stood out as the only vendor that could provide both, via the Infobip portal and a simple to implement Salesforce Marketing Cloud integration that could be solely managed by the marketing team at the bank.

Infobip were able to demonstrate the integration in real-time and through its due-diligence procedures, Metrobank’s IT and security experts were able to confirm that it was as simple and reliable as it appeared, with no impact on existing business processes or data integrity.

This solution provided several key advantages for Metrobank:

The process of sending a message deployment via Salesforce using Infobip’s plugin can be summarized in five simple steps.

The marketing team spent just two days setting up the implementation from a one-page set of instructions provided by Infobip. Our local staff were on hand via video call while they completed the steps, but no intervention was required due to the simplicity of the process.

After just a week of in-house testing the team were confident enough with the solution to start sending live messages over Viber for Business.

Metrobank staff were extremely satisfied with the ease and speed of setting up and managing the Viber implementation and how seamlessly it blended into existing processes. For all steps in the project, the time and resources required to achieve results were less than forecast.

After monitoring the new Viber channel for several months, the team recorded average cost savings of between 30% and 50% when compared to the same types of messages delivered by SMS. The higher figure was for more detailed and informative messages that would have required multiple SMS messages to convey, with a direct impact on cost.

The savings have enabled the team to achieve more with their communications budget and deliver tangible value for the bank.

Metrobank are now exploring how Viber’s two-way messaging capability could be used to drive further efficiencies and improve the customer experience. For example, by enabling front-line staff to use Viber for both customer support and relationship management use cases.