With endless options at their fingertips, modern banking consumers won’t wait around for firms to catch up. Anticipating consumer needs and having actionable strategies in place to meet them is the only way financial institutions can keep their customers from walking.
In our recent session at Quirk’s Dallas, Gianna Saladino, Senior Solutions Manager at quantilope, sat down with Shannon Giles, AVP of Consumer Insights at First Horizon Bank, to discuss how the financial institution moved away from traditional, siloed research toward a tech-led insights powerhouse for the wider organization.
Key Takeaways:
-
The shift from "gut instinct" to an insights ecosystem: To modernize a legacy institution, First Horizon Bank moved away from siloed, traditional research. By integrating consumer insights with Client Experience (CX), they created a "conveyor belt of insights", transforming their insights team from a cost center into a strategic powerhouse.
-
Speed and scale via automation: By adopting quantilope’s AI-driven platform, the First Horizon Bank significantly decreased the time from data collection to high-impact action. This tech-forward approach allowed them to scale rapidly, launching 12 core projects and surveying over 31,500 customers to track everything from NPS and brand health to MaxDiff and Implicit insights.
-
Building with the "End in Mind": A central pillar of their strategy was future-focused thinking. Instead of just validating data, the team focused on the "final story" they wanted to tell leadership. This led to a "brand growth flywheel": a continuous loop of exploring consumer needs, activating strategies, and monitoring impact — ensuring the voice of the customer directly influences boardroom KPIs.
Building an insights function from the ground up
When Shannon Giles joined First Horizon Bank in 2022, she faced a classic insights challenge: building a modern function for a legacy institution that had long relied on gut instinct to drive business decisions. Upon partnering with quantilope, her mission was to transform their traditional insights approach into an integrated engine that fuels strategic brand growth.
To drive this change within the organization, Shannon and her team focused on three strategic pillars:
- Innovative technology: The main goal was to establish a tech-forward way of working for a seamless insights process from raw data collection to high-impact actions, decreasing the time from insights to action.
- Future-focused thinking: To keep up with the pace of consumers and anticipate for the future, First Horizons Bank needed to “build with the end in mind” (what story do they want to tell leadership at the end of the day?).
- An insights ecosystem: By coupling consumer insights with client experience (CX), the bank would eliminate insight silos and make better use of their resources — or as Shannon refers to it, “a conveyer belt of insights”.
Unlocking the power of technology and automation
Central to their transformation was First Horizon Bank’s adoption of quantilope’s AI-driven platform. Through quantilope’s tech-forward, automated research approach, Shannon and her team were able to cultivate a client-centric mindset across the business.
Since adopting quantilope’s platform centered around brand growth, the First Horizon Bank team has launched 12 core projects and surveyed over 31,500 customers across five core strategic pillars, including competitive intelligence, brand tracking among key segments (B2C, B2B, private banking), pre/post campaign measurement for sponsorship effectiveness, customer experience, and customer satisfaction (especially among their young professional segment).
Within these studies, they’ve leveraged a variety of quantilope’s automated advanced methods to establish:
- Actionable tracking frameworks: An ongoing, high-frequency NPS tracker (with over 9,300 participants to date), and commercial brand tracker (with over 3,700 participants to date).
- Clear prioritization: Multiple MaxDiff studies (B2C and B2B) to validate and prioritize refreshed attribute sets for both consumer and commercial clients, as well as identify key drivers for recommendation/loyalty.
- Implicit Measurement: Four Multi-Implicit Association Teting (MIAT) modules to uncover subconscious drivers and associations for both B2C and B2B customers.
- Campaign measurement: Pre/post designs to measure brand lift for key campaigns and assess the impact of sponsorships.
Their breadth of automated research has transformed how the bank leverages and acts on insights. By moving beyond simple data validation to become more connected with their clients through quantilope’s integrated brand growth system, Shannon and her team have shaped how real consumer voices are brought into the boardroom as KPIs. They now have a quicker and more agile way to listen, understand, and deliver on client experience, elevating the impact of insights across the entire organization.
"We started very foundational with our [quantilope] tracker, because we just had to just get data coming in the door…over time, that evolved from a purely marketing-centric product to an enterprise tool that the entire company relies on."
— Shannon Giles
Turning Insights Into a Brand Growth Flywheel
For First Horizon Bank, transforming their tracking approach was about more than just automating their collection of insights. It was the first step in turning their data into a comprehensive performance platform.
At quantilope, we call this our brand growth “flywheel” — the continuous loop between exploration, activation, and monitoring research. By testing their ideas and initiatives with advanced methodologies like MaxDiff and MIAT, First Horizon Bank enters their first stage of the flywheel with exploratory research. Using those insights, they have a clear path forward on how to put those insights into action (the activation stage). After implementing those decisions, their team has direct access to quantilope’s platform to monitor impact (did those decisions help, hurt, or maintain their brand performance relative to competitors?).
From there, the “flywheel” kicks right back into gear, with new phases of exploring, activating, and monitoring — generating the comprehensive brand performance platform that Shannon initially set out to accomplish.
The future of insights: faster, deeper, smarter
First Horizon continues to push the boundaries of what's possible, exploring new tools and approaches to stay agile in an ever-shifting market. Their partnership with quantilope has empowered the bank to stay deeply connected to the modern consumer while maintaining the trust of a 162-year-old institution.
By partnering with quantilope, the insights team evolved from a "cost center" into a high-value strategic partner, leaning on quantilope’s platform to easily scale a meaningful tracking program. In addition to their continuous tracking research already in place, the First Horizon Bank team also plans to soon leverage quantilope’s Category Entry Points (CEPs).
By identifying the specific needs, motives, and occasions (CEPs) that lead a consumer to a financial institution, First Horizon Bank will determine clear ways to stand out in their space during the moments that matter most (this is known as Mental Availability). Their CEP insights will lend themselves to potential new brand positioning, refreshed marketing campaigns, or new loyalty programs to better serve customers in their category — beyond standard brand awareness and usage metrics.
Shannon’s takeaway for fellow insights leaders?
“I love this industry. It’s the change and the ability to answer complex problems that drives me. Don’t be afraid to think differently, connect with others, and always build with the final story in mind.”
— Shannon Giles
To learn more about how quantilope is helping brands like First Horizon Bank generate brand growth with tech-forward innovation, get in touch below!
.png)
