How we use insight to get close to our customers

At Paragon, we have an active insight programme to help us get close to our customers. The programme is organised around four strategic pillars - measuring what matters, knowing our customers, empowering our people and enhancing insight.

Measuring what matters

This is the aspect of insight that people are most familiar with, comprising the traditional customer satisfaction survey.

We conduct ongoing satisfaction surveys for our landlords, mortgage intermediaries and savings customers.

Taking savings as an example, we gather feedback when customers open a new account, when their account matures and when they withdraw money from their accounts. Quantitative data lets us track where the scores are going up or down and qualitative verbatim comments help us to identify aspects of the customer journey where customers might be having difficulty.

Knowing our customers

Knowing our customers is all about exploring the needs and behaviours of our customers more broadly.

During the pandemic, for example, we've been sending regular surveys to our landlord customers so that we can understand how the crisis is impacting their lettings business. Importantly, this has helped us to identify what percentage of customers might need a little bit of extra support as they navigate through the changing landscape.

Empowering our people

This area of our insight programme involves gathering information from our customers to inform our decision making about how we design our products and services.

It’s been invaluable for a number of projects but, most recently, it’s helped us to map out a new online application process for our SME lending customers. Acting on feedback, we’ve focused on keeping the amount of information customers need to input on to the application form to an absolute minimum, drawing in information from other data sources to complete the detail.

Enhancing insight

Enhancing insight focuses on understanding the broader market that Paragon operates in and looking at how customer trends are changing more generally.

There’s lots of headlines, for example, that say the pandemic has encouraged more customers to access their financial services online. Using a wide range of market-wide surveys and intelligence, we’re able to look behind the headlines and see which customer groups are moving fastest and what support customers need, helping us to stay ahead of developments.