By using artificial intelligence to connect CommBank’s 7.5 million digitally active customers with Australian retailers, we can save consumers money while boosting retailers’ sales.
Looking at the year ahead, one big question for Australian retailers will be how to maintain and build on these digital connections with consumers and find new incremental channels for growth.
This has also been a focus for the CommBank team as we continue to build a digital shopping ecosystem designed to match offers and deals from retailers with our millions of customers.
The objective is to bring personalised banking and shopping together with the help of artificial intelligence. After initially launching our cashback program, CommBank Rewards, which helped retailers drive sales while returning almost $13 million in savings to our customers, since launching in December 2019. We have recently announced two further developments.
The latest addition of online shopping hub, Little Birdie, and brand and deal discovery app, Cheddar, to CommBank’s shopping offer highlight the power of technology to anticipate the needs of businesses and consumers and link them directly with each other.
Online shopping hub
In-app shopping platform Little Birdie has recently been launched in the CommBank app. The Australian start-up aspires to build the homepage for shopping, bringing together the best shopping offers all in one place. It offers more than 70 million products to search, compare, track and share, plus notifications of sales events and discounts.
Little Birdie addresses the problem of shoppers having to painfully trawl the net in search of the best offers, which can make shopping online an overwhelming experience. This can lead to abandoned carts and customer churn. Instead, Little Birdie uses artificial intelligence and its savvy online user community to vote products up or down in the rankings and promote the best offers.
Through our partnership with Little Birdie, our 7.5 million digitally active retail customers get access to the most relevant shopping deals. It helps to connect them with our 700,000 business customers.
The partnership, and integration with the CommBank app, recognise that retailers and brands are looking for new and better ways to connect and engage with shoppers. It means we can provide a new channel for retailers to gain highly qualified traffic. More than 1000 retailers have already signed up to this significant, low-cost source of leads for businesses.
Redefining retail behaviour for Gen Z & Millennials
Cheddar is a brand and deal discovery app built by x15ventures, CBA’s venture-scaling business. Designed for millennials & Gen Z, it resembles a social media platform, serving up personalised, bite-sized, authentic content from brands, along with epic deals and cashback.
It responds to two distinctive behaviours in young shoppers: “deal stacking”, including loyalty email signups and coupon codes, and “digital window shopping”, namely finding inspiration through social media and branded content. Using artificial intelligence to understand what individual users are engaging with, Cheddar aggregates and serves up deals personalised for their feed in a shareable, engaging and fun way.
More than 1000 young Australians were involved in the design process to ensure Cheddar delivers to their needs and shopping preferences. We are also inviting retailers to collaborate with us as we build Cheddar’s product development roadmap.
More than 600 youth-focused merchants already use Cheddar to serve deals and offers to highly engaged consumers at scale. They tell us that engagement rates are significantly higher than the click-through rates they see on other platforms, which helps drive down the cost of acquiring new customers and increase basket size within this hard to reach segment.
Delivering growth opportunities
As we build on Little Birdie and Cheddar, CommBank has the potential to become one of the largest and lowest-cost sources of leads for our consumer-facing business customers. The aim is to bring together our retail and business customers in a meaningful way using artificial intelligence. This has the potential to unlock value for both.
Find out more: CommBank’s latest partnerships.
https://www.commbank.com.au/latest/partnerships.html
https://www.getcheddar.com.au/
https://www.littlebirdie.com.au/
About the author: Jerry Macey is Executive Manager, Consumer and Diversified Industries, at Commonwealth Bank of Australia.
Things you should know:
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