Day In Life Of Human Behind NAB’s ‘Customer Brain’

National Australia Bank

Ever wondered what Data + Artificial Intelligence (AI) ‘experts’ do? Interested in how data and AI powers are making the bank safer and simpler?

Here is a look into this world with NAB’s Head of Customer Decisioning, Lisa.

My alarm goes off…

At 5.34am.

Yes, it’s a weird time, but I don’t like the sound of getting up at 5:30am, those extra four minutes make all the difference. I’m busily making school lunches and wrangling my two primary school aged kids in the morning, once I jump on the train for work with coffee in hand, I can start to get into the rhythm of my work day.

I am responsible for…

Leading the team that designs and builds NAB’s ‘Customer Brain’.

The ‘Customer Brain’ is…

We are using data and training AI to better understand our customers’ needs and build a Customer Brain. To put it very simply, Customer Brain is a fancy way of saying technology that remembers when it’s your birthday, reminds you to make a deposit in your savings account so you don’t miss out on bonus interest and nudges us to update you on the progress of your transaction dispute. This creates more personalised experiences for customers daily, on a large scale.

Our team ensures that the Brain is making smart and safe decisions.

I got my job…

I’ve got an Economics degree, but early on in my career I found myself in marketing analytics roles, working across both government and financial services. This experience enabled me to open other opportunities for roles in marketing performance, digital marketing, marketing data science and marketing technology.

Understanding the customer journey end-to-end – from analytics to communications – was pivotal to landing my current role heading up the Customer Decisioning team at NAB.

My typical day…

Every day is very different, but it’s always very focused on customers or supporting my team.

At the moment I’m spending a lot of time working with different areas of the business – from personal bank to business bank – on how we can build out ‘actions’ that the Brain can help us with to provide better customer experiences for their use cases (e.g. working with the home lending team on how to build more actions to engage their customers when they are paying down their loan).

Best change my team has made for customers…

I love some of our newer actions associated with customer engagement. For example, we are improving the way we communicate updates to customers who have processed a transaction dispute. I also love that we now congratulate our customers on banking milestones or birthdays through the NAB app. Hopefully people reading this will have experienced these messages when they’ve logged in!

Most important skill for this career…

Curiosity.

Not holding back on questions when you don’t understand.

Plan B…

Travel Agent.

I was lucky enough to do a lot of backpacking in my younger days and I’ve seen a lot of the world. I’d love to bring this real-world experience to life for people as they design their dream holidays.

Lisa’s story is part of NAB’s annual Data + AI Month, hosted by the Data & Analytics Guild. It’s an in-house series of data centric events that showcase the capabilities at NAB through learning and development sessions, panel discussions and partner demonstrations.

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