Enhance Customer Relationships Through Enterprise Adaptability

Customers are the lifeblood of any financial services institution or organization. An organization that cannot attract and retain customers will not flourish, indeed, it may not even survive.

One of the key questions that any financial services institution (or any other services-oriented business, for that matter) must ask is, “What do we need to do to attract new customers, retain current customers and prevent competitors from siphoning them away from us, and make our relationship more valuable to both us and the customer?”

The answer is both simple to articulate and difficult to implement. The company needs to provide products and services that meet—or exceed—customers’ needs, at a price that will provide a reasonable profit to the enterprise.

Regardless of how your particular company addresses this core strategic issue, one fact stands out clearly— it is virtually impossible in today’s modern, global economy to profitably deliver customer services and remain competitive without investing in information technologies to help manage customer relationships.

Financial services institutions live and die every day by the services and products they provide to fickle and demanding customers, and need to be able to change direction quickly to meet competitive challenges or take advantage of emerging opportunities. Only by deploying enterprise-wide customer management technology will they be able to capture data on their customers and markets, understand how their customers want to be served, and be able to analyze and respond to changes in customer needs and desires.

During this first decade of the new millennium it’s become increasingly clear that successful customer management strategies are based on the concept of enterprise adaptability.

Adaptability is defined as “the ability to change to fit changed circumstances.” When this concept is applied to customer relationships it can have many ramifications.

• In a dynamic business environment, the enterprise must be able to sense-and-react to changing market conditions. These can vary, depending on whether they are caused by shifts in market structure, new competitive threats, changes in the overall economy, or other factors.
• An adaptive enterprise is sensitive to changing customer requirements. It creates an optimal customer experience by creating and delivering incremental services that customers desire and are willing to pay for. This requires an IT infrastructure capable of seamlessly tracking and managing interactions across all customer touch points (retail, web, email, fax, call center, etc.).
• A company must also adapt to its end user needs. Not all users are alike, and an adaptable system provides a personalized interface for the user, based on his or her specific information needs. Ideally, the system should also be able to dynamically modify its behavior, depending on what the user is doing.
• Every organization is unique, and a successful system will adapt to the unique attributes of the company in a number of ways. It should be able to be quickly customized to implement unique, proprietary services. It should provide a foundation for continuous customer process improvement. It should empower the enterprise to implement shifts in strategy faster.
• Part of each company’s uniqueness is its specific information architecture. Many financial services institutions have invested huge sums in customized, mission-critical software. An adaptive customer management solution preserves the organization’s existing investment in information technology by using open standards to integrate with other IT assets.

Financial services institutions that are interested in creating an adaptive customer management environment require a comprehensive range of capabilities:

• Comprehensive customer data—organizations need a wide range of customer data, including demographics, financial status, current and anticipated lifestyle changes (college age children, retirement concerns, changing insurance requirements), etc. Interactions with customers, regardless of channel, must also be captured and analyzed to understand customer needs, wants, and desires.
• Actionable information—data is useless if it can’t be leveraged throughout the organization. Companies need the ability to search and filter data to identify prospects or customers who will be amenable to specific promotions or offerings. Or, they may need to alert customer-facing staff to essential information in real time. For example, a teller should be alerted when a customer with overdue loan payment presents him or herself to withdraw a large sum of money from a checking account. In other circumstances, an asset manager may want to offer a tailored annuity package to a client nearing retirement who is shifting his or her investment portfolio.
• Service processes delivery—customers are highly sensitive to how they are treated. Does the institution answer the phone quickly and recognize the customer when they call in? Do they answer questions or resolve issues promptly? Can they provide rapid turn around for specific offerings (new account origination, new loan origination, refinancing a home, etc.) Financial services institutions need software solutions that support the delivery of services that are personalized to the customer’s needs.
• Deep insight—companies need to be able to perform comprehensive data analysis to identify customer needs and desires. This will enable them to develop products and services strategies that will meet those needs.
• Integrated data—if you look in the back office of almost any financial services institution of scale, you’ll find dozens of existing systems. Many of these systems date back 15 or more years, but they deliver mission-critical services reliably and effectively, day-in and day-out. A customer management solution must easily and seamlessly share data bi-directionally with these systems, using open industry standards.

Customers of Onyx Software have successfully addressed these challenges by implementing the following integrated software components, which can be customized to address the core business values that the enterprise is based on.

Onyx Customer Management is used primarily by sales, marketing, and customer service personnel. The Onyx CRM software captures comprehensive data about customers and prospects from a variety of sources, including marketing campaigns, incoming sales inquiries, and contacts made through internet sites and call centers. Telesales and customer support specialists user powerful scripting software that manages one-on-one customer interactions, while remote users have access to customer data using either wireless (Blackberry, PocketPC, Palm Treo and iMode) or offline versions. Add-on products are available for call center telephony integration, email communications, document and knowledge management, and web self-service portals.

Onyx Process Management is an end-to-end business process management system fully integrated with the Onyx Customer Management portfolio. Many CRM vendors provide customization capabilities that require software developers to write custom code. Onyx’s process management approach empowers customers to create dynamic, integrated customer processes, eliminating the need for expensive, time-consuming custom software development. Onyx’s enables companies to modify customer-facing processes for maximum adaptability to shifting market conditions.

Onyx Performance Management delivers analytics capabilities to users at all levels of the organization, from call center operator to senior management. A complete set of analysis tools, reports, scorecards, dashboards, and deep on-line analytical processing (OLAP) capabilities enable end users to better manage the elements of the business that are important to them.

Onyx software runs on a modern application server, implemented using a standards-based, service-oriented architecture (SOA). The SOA approach enables customers to quickly and easily link their core back office, legacy applications with the Onyx customer management and process management applications.

By leveraging analytics, process management, and customer management software in a fully integrated environment, Onyx customers can quickly identify changing customer or market trends using Onyx analytics, create or modify a customer-facing process using Onyx process management, and deliver the changes to employees through the Onyx customer management application.

Representative financial services customers using Onyx.
Retail banking—ASB Bank is a full service, national bank in New Zealand, with more than 800,000 retail and personal customers and $17 billion in assets under management. ASB integrated Onyx with their credit card and loan approval processes, their platform teller application for loans and deposits, their secure internet banking web site, and their call center telephony switch. They deployed a standardized, end-to-end retail sales automation application, which is accessed daily by more than 5000 users. Onyx has enabled them to develop a single view of the customer, create consolidated multi-channel marketing campaigns, and increase sales of credit cards, home and personal lending, and insurance.

Private banking—Mellon Bank is a major private bank that provides a range of portfolio services to individuals of high net worth. Referrals tend to come primarily from intermediaries (CPAs, estate lawyers, etc.) With over 20,000 intermediaries, Mellon needed a better way to identify and focus on the 10% of intermediaries who were responsible for the greatest portion of their incoming new business opportunities. Since implementing Onyx, Mellon has increased new customer sales and has also been able to increase customer wallet share by reacting quickly to changing market conditions. Because different clients prefer to be contacted differently, Onyx system has enabled them to personalize their approach to clients, consistent with the client’s wishes. Finally, they customized their system to ensure that they deliver the right data to the right user at the right time, increasing end user effectiveness and efficiency.

Credit union – Texans Credit Union is the second largest employee (Texas Instruments) credit union in Texas, second only to American Airlines credit union, with 150,000 members and $1.5 billion assets under management. Texans needed to track and respond better to customer interactions, regardless of channel. They integrated Onyx with an IBM mainframe application to create a single view of the customer that provides sales and call center reps with all the information they need to effectively interact with the member. They particularly appreciate the fact that Onyx alerts them if a member who owes them money comes into a branch or calls on the phone. Texans is also compiling data that enables the system to automatically alert call center reps to ask customers about potential future business, such as a new car or house loan, when they visit.

Insurance – A major multinational insurance company (which prefers to remain unnamed) has one of the largest broker-dealer networks in the US with more than 7,000 independent financial professionals. Lack of centralized customer information resulted in poor visibility into the business, especially the sales pipeline. They also needed to be able to collaborate directly with customers over the web. Since implementing Onyx, more than 40% of their registered representative interactions occur over the web, they have been able to reduce headcount and liability, while at the same time customer service is an all time high.

Retirement –Prudential Investments, a subsidiary of Prudential Insurance, markets an extensive array of financial products, including mutual funds, annuities and managed money accounts through a network of approximately 100,000 broker-dealers and financial advisors throughout the United States. Previously, field coordinators captured daily activity and sales information about brokers on individual PCs, preventing an enterprise-wide view of customer data. Using Onyx, Prudential implemented a single Web-based system for tracking sales leads, contact information, sales activities and more. As a result, field coordinators have the information they need to boost productivity and generate improved results. The field and national sales desk also work closely to capture new marketing and cross-selling opportunities, further increasing leads and revenue.