Behavioural Effects of Agentic Messaging: A Case Study on a Financial Service Application
This addresses customer retention and engagement challenges for financial service providers, though it appears incremental as it applies an existing agentic approach to a specific domain.
This study evaluated how agentic personalization in a financial service app's customer communications affects user behavior during tax filing season, finding it reduced unsubscribe events by 21% and increased early filing compared to a rule-based system.
Marketing and product personalisation provide a prominent and visible use-case for the application of Information Retrieval methods across several business domains. Recently, agentic approaches to these problems have been gaining traction. This work evaluates the behavioural and retention effects of agentic personalisation on a financial service application's customer communication system during a 2025 national tax filing period. Through a two month-long randomised controlled trial, we compare an agentic messaging approach against a business-as-usual (BAU) rule-based campaign system, focusing on two primary outcomes: unsubscribe behaviour and conversion timing. Empirical results show that agent-led messaging reduced unsubscribe events by 21\% ($\pm 0.01$) relative to BAU and increased early filing behaviour in the weeks preceding the national deadline. These findings demonstrate how adaptive, user-level decision-making systems can modulate engagement intensity whilst improving long-term retention indicators.