A bank and a new CEO

I was the architect and project manager of a CRM solution for a large bank with eight totally different divisions, all with different types of clients and business models. The bank went through a period of financial difficulties, and the CEO of the company was replaced by a new entrant from another country and another company. This new CEO had to make some tough decisions and therefore cutting costs by canceling some of the ongoing projects and planned investments was a priority for him.

He was commissioned to turn the company back to profit within a three-year time window by reducing operational costs and improving market share in what was a very tough environment.

At the very start of his assignment as the new CEO of this company, he called all the business leaders and board members to a meeting and asked them to provide him with a clear picture of how often they, and their respective staff, were interacting with their customers and what the outcome of all these interactions was.

In some cases, the same customer was connected with different business units for different subjects on various occasions. The new CEO wanted to know what the subjects of interactions were and what was moving customers and the market. He also wanted to know how the staff were capturing this valuable data and how they followed up on interactions and opportunities. In a nutshell, he wanted to know if the bank had a central repository for all customer interactions and the detailed data related to these interactions in order to slice and dice the data.

The new CEO wanted to make decisions based on important business metrics and so he needed this data. You would expect every organization would have this data repository, especially a large, multi-division bank, yet unfortunately, this was not the case, and actually, in many companies today, this is still not the case. We know customer interaction data is highly valuable for any business and you would agree that every company needs to capture this data.

Customers will contact your company on many different occasions and for many different reasons. They are typically asking for your advice on your products. They may submit a complaint, submit a request for support, respond to a marketing campaign, or even give you information about your company and your market.

Your customers will happily provide, at no cost, continuous feedback about your products and your services. They very often tell you what your competitors are doing and they share their sentiment with you on every single connection. You will know whether they are very happy or not so happy with every interaction. Just think about how valuable all this data could be to your business if you had a central repository of structured data about all these interactions. You could slice and dice the data for better business insight and through that, make informed business decisions.

In this bank, the new CEO found out that all these client interactions were not managed and captured systematically by all eight business units. There was no central repository of customer interactions except that of the call center, which collected limited information when capturing a customer complaint or a service request. Each business unit had its own tools and its own way of managing interactions with its clients. Clients were categorized into different segments in several databases, depending on revenue and profitability, and sometimes the same customer was managed by multiple departments. Each business unit was using a different process to manage and collect client interaction data. In some scenarios, a single client interaction was captured with different tools and different databases.

So, in this company, a central repository of the client interactions, their relationship with different business units, and the overall view of customer contacts was missing. There was no data available to the new CEO to make insightful decisions. He wanted to have the data to build data marts and eventually make decisions based on the data.

The CEO wanted to know how often customers were connecting with the company's staff, how they connected, what channel they used, how long they interacted with the employees, and what the subjects of these interactions were, along with outcomes and business opportunities with different departments of the bank. He wanted to use this data to improve processes, products, services, marketing campaigns, and customer satisfaction.

As an example, if a customer has a product or service issue and has opened a case with the customer service center and the very next day, she or he is connecting with your company's relationship manager in private banking or facility management, how is this data collected and connected? Is the information available and considered in all interactions with the customer?

Is the relationship manager informed about the open customer case while interacting about a business opportunity with her or his client? From the CRM point of view, the CEO was asking for a comprehensive 360-degree client view with full data on all the interactions, over all channels, stored as structured data in a single repository. This is often the first step toward any successful CRM implementation and is something we will cover in Chapter 2, Getting to Know Your Customer.

In this particular case, the CEO formed a task force to implement an enterprise-wide solution that would capture all interactions between clients with all eight business units, something that would be deployed within three months. The requirement was for a strong interaction management tool to efficiently capture, acknowledge, assign, track, and resolve all the different types of customer requests. The application would provide a facility for inter-department collaboration. He communicated his vision over all available channels with all the staff of the company over and over again, repeatedly explaining what his expectations were and why the company and all the staff needed to support this initiative.

This was a great success, mainly because of strong top-management support. We completed the requirements of gathering workshops with the eight different business units within three weeks. We then spent another three weeks compiling both the Business Requirement Document (BRD) and detailed specifications.

Next, we got approval from business leaders in three weeks, with another three weeks spent on designing and customizing the solution, based on a standard CRM packet. Parallel to that, we completed the integration work with the Data Warehouse (DWH) and the initial data load.

User Acceptance Testing (UAT) and System Integration Testing (SIT) each took a week, before we started the Train-the-Trainer (TTT) sessions in parallel to UAT and end-user training in parallel to SIT. We went live on time and on budget in less than four months!