Seylan Bank last Friday night (23 May 2014) walked away with two top awards for Digital Marketing under the sub-categories ‘Innovation’ and ‘Promotion’ at the Second Asian Customer Engagement Awards held in Mumbai, India.

‘Seylan Tikiri Gift Rush - Game App Launch’ won an award in the ‘Innovation’ category while ‘The Big Seylan Quiz on Facebook’ won an award in the ‘Promotion’ category. Seylan Bank thus goes on record as being the only Sri Lankan bank, as well as the only South Asian bank, to win not one but two awards at these prestigious awards.

Expressing his delight at winning these two awards, Deputy General Manager (Marketing) Tilan Wijeyesekera said, “Seylan Bank has constantly kept abreast with rapidly emerging and contemporary marketing trends. Digital and social media marketing is one such example which has made a significant impact in the Sri Lankan marketing landscape. Seylan Bank engages in acquiring and retaining specific customer segments via digital and social media marketing. Harnessing modern technology we were among the pioneers in new age media. We launched web and digital applications such as internet banking, SMS banking, our trilingual website (www.eseylan.com ), social media channels such as Facebook, Twitter and Youtube to reach customers and increase our customer touch points to increase customer engagement and add value to our customers in order to build further brand loyalty”. He further added, “We would also like to take this opportunity to thank all our customers and social media fans who interacted with us, our committed staff and our social media agency Loops Solutions.”

Senior Manager, Liability Product Management at Seylan Bank Dinesh Jebamani said, “This is a great encouragement to the team at Seylan Bank, to know that our efforts have been rewarded at an international level. Seylan Bank has, at all times, been providing innovative solutions to all our customer segments in respect of, business to customers and business to business. The Bank is strengthened with highly skilled and dedicated staff that is willing to learn new trends and focus on collaborating with external vendors in order to develop and execute effective strategies on Digital Marketing”.

The Seylan Tikiri Gift Rush was a specially developed Game App which could be played on a computer, an android smart phone device or on Facebook. The app was launched coinciding with World Children’s Day last October and with it Seylan Bank became the first-ever to launch such a Game Application in Sri Lanka’s banking industry for the Minor Accounts segment. The game depicted the actual prizes children could obtain free if they deposited money in a Tikiri Savings account at the end of each level. While this was a simple online game in a hypothetical setting, it also encouraged children to save and get these gifts for real.

The Seylan BIG Quiz on Facebook was an open game for the fans of the Seylan Bank Facebook Page and conducted last year. It was an online questionnaire where fans had to answer five multiple choice questions within 15 minutes. The questions were in relation to Seylan Bank’s various products and services with the intention of creating a great deal of customer engagement. Customers were motivated to visit our website and branches as well as call our hotline to find the answers in order to win the rewards. All fans who answered all five questions correctly were routed to a weekly draw where a winner was chosen by a random draw. This continued for four weeks during November 2013 and the Bank rewarded the lucky winners with a cash prize of Rs. 25,000/- each.

Now in its second year The Customer Engagement Forum and inaugural Awards are organised to deliver the ultimate customer experience which will set customer centric companies apart from their competition in today’s competitive market to stay up to date with the latest in customer feedback, engagement, loyalty and retention techniques to benchmark their own multi-channel strategies against corporate innovators and leaders.

Photo caption: Seylan Bank’s Senior Manager, Liability Product Management, Dinesh Jebamani receives the awards from Avinash Oza, Group Director – Brand Communications, DDB Mudra (India) at the Second Asian Customer Engagement Awards held at ITC Grand Central Hotel  Mumbai, India last Friday.