Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

The Client

The client, a major U.S. bank, provides credit card, banking, and financial services to 10 million customers.

The Challenge

The client desired an information distribution and delivery infrastructure that would put it at a competitive advantage in the increasingly competitive and information-intensive financial services industry. They identified an enterprise-level data warehouse environment with supporting data marts and data mines as key to helping them achieve their business objectives. The client identified the following issues:

• Strengthening customer ties weakened by a decade of consolidation and cost-cutting.
• Finding ways of integrating a costly infrastructure of newer communication channels, such as call centers and eMessaging capabilities.
• Stemming the tide of loss of customers and customer value to non-bank competitors.

Complicating any attempt to address these issues with technology was the fact that the client’s customer data was housed in over 33 non-integrated transactional systems.

The Solution

The client decided to implement a CRM solution that would help it cultivate and nurture interactive, personalized customer relationships and achieve five business objectives:

• Identify its most valuable customers.
• Increase its “wallet share” with its customers.
• Develop the best mix of products and services.
• Understand and analyze customer behavior.
• Tailor marketing campaigns to address customer needs.

The client selected BearingPoint to build and deliver its CRM system. Powered by Exchange Application, Inc.’s Valex software, the system includes a comprehensive customer-centric data warehouse with a supporting analytic data mart and a highly functional campaign management system.

Following the large-scale CRM system implementation, we launched phase two and added commercial data sources and specialized data marts for risk management and profitability analysis, providing up-to-the-minute customer data.

The Benefits

The client’s CRM system is helping it learn how to invest intelligently in customer relationships. The new system provides a central information repository, where everyone in the organization can view relevant and consistent customer data and analyses from any branch or from the corporate marketing organization. Such access provides the means to coordinate front-line marketing efforts with centralized marketing to ensure that customers are treated consistently. The system also helps instill a profit-focused discipline with front-line employees, enabling the bank to maximize the profit derived from direct customer contact. The system can send information from the customer contact points back to corporate headquarters for further assessment, so that subsequent central marketing campaigns can be supplemented with informed local interaction to attain maximum financial results.

Tracking customer activities allows the bank to find ways to cross-sell and up-sell products and services. By providing relevant, timely information to customers, the bank can increase its share of each customer’s business.