How Cogo creates personalised customer experiences

Sustainability is not a one-size-fits-all journey. Each person's path is shaped by unique circumstances. For example, someone living in the countryside might find it difficult to use public transport. While someone who really loves meat might struggle to switch to a vegetarian diet in one step. 

Our mission at Cogo is to provide personalised, accessible information to engage people where they are, respect their values and differences, and build trust before helping them reduce their environmental impact. 

How Cogo creates personalised customer experiences 

We enrich transactional spending data to offer a personalised customer experience. 

Personalised carbon footprints

We calculate people’s carbon footprint based on their spending habits. This spend-based approach is the easiest and most credible way to measure personal environmental impact. It offers real-time feedback, helping raise awareness about how people’s everyday choices affect the environment. Our research shows that people often underestimate the impact of certain actions, like flying, so showing users the carbon emissions associated with their behaviour helps improve carbon literacy. We communicate carbon footprints on a spectrum which uses scale and colour to help users compare their impact to averages, and we help people track their progress over time. 

Quantified climate actions

Moving beyond awareness, we can also send users personalised recommendations on how they can reduce their footprint. Our ‘quantified climate actions’ help people understand the potential impact of committing to action—before they take the action—based on their purchasing history. For example, if you buy fuel for your car, we would show you how much carbon you could save with a ‘switch to an EV’ climate action. This provides contextual information around which actions have more or less impact for each individual, and helps to lower the threshold for behaviour change. 

See how we implemented quantified climate actions for NatWest in this blog.

In app-engagement features

We use behavioural science techniques like nudges, to steer people towards choices that align with their values. We have also developed a carbon budget feature, so people can better understand their footprint, track progress, and set clear goals for improvement. Our goal is not to guilt-trip users, but to give their carbon footprint more context. If they stay under budget, that’s great, we give them positive acknowledgement and encourage them to keep going. If they go over their budget, they have the ability to see which transaction categories had the biggest impact on their carbon footprint, take the learnings and try again next month. Users can also edit their budget to reflect changes in their lifestyle, such as moving in with a partner.

‍Feedback and positive reinforcement 

Users can see feedback on the carbon savings they’ve made by committing to certain climate actions. For example, after buying a bus ticket, customers would receive a positive message showing how much carbon they've saved compared to driving. This creates positive reinforcement, helping keep customers engaged on their sustainable journey. 

‍Benefits for banks 

For banks, collaborating with Cogo opens doors to deeper customer engagement and loyalty. Once banks engage users on their sustainability journey and qualify their customer base, they can then seamlessly launch embedded, low-carbon financing products at the point of need. This could include, for example, EV loans, green mortgages or home energy retrofit propositions. These offers are personalised to the customer, leading to higher conversion rates for banks, and increased likelihood of users investing in some of the higher impact climate actions, like home retrofitting. 

Visit cogo.co to learn more about our mission and approach to creating personalised journeys.