There are 1000s of published cases that prove the commercial value of investment in creative communications. These have generated a significant body of learning about how advertising works. In contrast there are as yet few published cases demonstrating the commercial value of creativity and investment in customer experience. This is important because it is one of the first of what we hope will be many cases about how experience works and how to measure it.

In our specific case, we examine how a relatively small element of an overall experience improved brand engagement and recommendation whilst at the same time sharply reducing the cost of delivering utility and satisfaction.

Our objectives were to:

• Drive engagement with a group of valuable younger, tech-savvy customers

• Do it cost-effectively (a service was already in place that cost 65p per transaction)

• Drive loyalty and satisfaction

• Bring to life the NatWest/ RBS brand promise of Helpful Banking / Here for you

Commercially, our imperative was to focus on the younger audiences most at threat from the (soon to be implemented) 7-day bank switching service. Younger audiences both represented high lifetime value and were amongst the most likely to switch.

In bringing an existing, clunky call centre based service to market through mobile (enhancing it along the way), we created a no-cost digital service that rapidly gained traction with our core audience – a 15x growth in usage in just 2 years that can be linked to a positive growth in mobile engagement, satisfaction and loyalty. On cost savings alone, the service has saved the bank over £1m per year (against an initial cost of c£100k).

Get Cash demonstrates that the story of a brand cannot just be told - but needs to be lived (and shared) by consumers through the experiences that brand delivers. It takes digital creativity beyond the realm of inviting techniques designed to gather Facebook likes or driving website traffic into a space where we deliver genuine utility people value and share –a new frontier for commercial creativity.

Partly as a result of the success of Get Cash, we are now focused on developing a whole series of utility driven experiences – each one centred around a new opportunity to deliver on the RBS/NatWest ‘Here For You/ Helpful Banking’ brand promise.