Rising to the challenge of CRM

In July 2005, JPMorgan Chase and Bank One completed the integration to one common platform, John Geissler speaks to FST about the role of CRM since the integration was complete.

The potential benefits of adding CRM technologies to your enterprise are well documented: more effective reach and marketing, improved customer service and support, enhanced customer loyalty, greater efficiency and cost reductions, improved company communication and networking through better access to quality information. In larger organizations this can even lead to a better stand against global competition. Making sure you decide on the right CRM technologies and strategies is vital, so you can best leverage the data most relevant to your business. But how do you do that when the organization is one of the largest credit card issuers in the U.S.?

The merger between JPMorgan Chase and Bank One in 2004 combined two major financial players. Although the merger wasn’t quite on the same scale as the JPMorgan and Chase Bank merger of 2001, this more recent activity resulted in a number of new growth opportunities. Notable amongst them was the creation of a team headed by John Geissler, Marketing Director of CRM in Chase Card Services - the credit card division of JPMorgan Chase (NYSE: JPM). “In 2005 the reason they brought me in was because CRM was seen as a growth initiative for the company,” he explains. “It was viewed over a multi-year period because it will take time to realize the full opportunity, but we believe as we launch into the next three years CRM will become embedded in the way we do business.”

The opportunity that the merger afforded - to implement new strategies of customer management – was an exciting proposition, if not difficult and to some degree an experimental one. “A result of the merger was that all the current infrastructure we are using belonged to heritage Bank One. Through the technology rationalization, process decisions were made to migrate heritage Chase over to the emerging heritage Bank One platform.”

The goal of the CRM pilot is to demonstrate improved marketing/campaign effectiveness by leveraging customer-level information combined with a customized customer contact strategy. “If you can not do that in today’s competitive environment, you’re perceived as not understanding your customers. Our program is evolving, we’re not there yet but we are taking on more responsibility, bringing together a more customized targeting and contact management strategy.”

This enhanced approach to marketing is one that can only benefit both Chase and their customers, which is why Geissler’s role is important to the future of Chase Card Services. “We’ve got great organizational support behind this opportunity that we need to leverage and capture fully. My mandate is to execute at a customer level, rationalize offers and deliver them as quickly as possible. From a customer’s perspective, we’re trying to enhance the relevancy in what and how we interact with them.”

Technology-wise, the pilot that Geissler manages has introduced new campaign management tools, pattern recognition tools and an evolving process to help distribute and rationalize offers. “We’re putting in infrastructure and processes to provide a holistic customer view to our servicing advisors, as well as capabilities to display the most relevant offer should the customer call into Cardmember Services. The increased focus on tools and process has already begun to generate positive benefits for the program and the business.”

Geissler identifies three main areas of focus that he has tackled from a strategy perspective: “Managing new accounts is the first. I call it ‘onboarding’ - how can we ‘onboard’ new customers to maximize the account opening experience, whether it’s additional services, product fit or incorporating other lines of business products in that customer interaction.
The second area of focus is engagement programs for a subset of the existing cardmember portfolio that Geissler’s team is responsible for. “Basically we are developing trigger-based marketing capabilities, demonstrating that we can detect a change in behavior, and then determine how best to respond to it,” he explains. “Most of these campaigns involve recognition of the customer’s behavior combined with engagement offers. Our objective is to increase card usage, or in some cases, just maintain their current usage of our cards.”

The third part has come about uniquely due to the merger: a portion of the customer base with multiple accounts. According to Geissler, some customers “had one card with heritage Bank One and one card with heritage Chase, and now they are a multi-card customer. When you talk about customer management, inevitably people think across retail banks, cards, deposits and savings. Inherent within Card Services though, there are a portion of customers who have multiple card accounts with us, so the question then becomes how best to manage a multi-account relationship, because a lot of the core infrastructure capability is focused at the account level.”

So how has the program fared so far? “Truly, I don’t think we’ve done enough yet to give a full measure of the program,” he says. “The new CRM tools and processes are not completely integrated and aligned across all functions at this point, but we have made good progress thus far. Although, we’re not there yet, over time we will realize those benefits. It takes time to determine what the best way forwards is. We believe we need to evolve into customer-centric CRM strategies, but you also want to be able to deliver results the business requires. Given the size of our card business, it’s important we make sure we are transitioning to CRM at the appropriate pace . . . balancing what we need to deliver in-year, while at the same time evolving towards a more effective way.”

This balance is the result of a paradigmatic shift in thinking concerning customer relationships, as Geissler explains. “To shift from account-focus to a customer-focus … is a big change for most organizations. Change can be difficult but as we’ve shown – we’re 19 months into it - the understanding of future opportunity and general alignment behind what we’re doing is stronger than it ever has been.”

But what about the future? Geissler is confident about the importance of CRM in future business remains absolute. “In a few years, I probably won’t even have a CRM tag on my title anymore as we incorporate CRM into everything we do,” he says. We have a consolidating industry and over time the number of issuers will probably rationalize further. Success will most likely come down to who can manage their customer base most effectively ... building long, loyal and profitable customer relationships.”