Case Study

The Business Case for a Customer Context™ Server

Example: A retail bank existing for many years with a customer base of 50 million active accounts and marketing agreements to share information for 20 million prospects. Most customers are serviced through retail branches. The company operates three call centers; two of them on a 24x7 basis, but certain requests can only be handled at a branch during regular business hours. Different departments and subsidiaries of the bank, such as the mortgage company or the collection department, operate their own service call centers and employ a separate face-to-face sales force. The bank wants to transition towards an e-business and gain a unified view of all customers.

IT-Situation: The bank employs a variety of software applications on a variety of hardware platforms organized by business functions. The current state has not been master planned, but grown organically over the last twenty years. Each system was basically designed to solve a particular business function. None of the systems were designed with the customer as focal point.

Customer data are typically organized around product and functional systems, e.g. each product group is maintained by a software application from a different vendor holding data about the customers who bought that product. Additionally, customer data are stored in billing, order fulfillment and other transaction processing systems. Generally, it is not known within a legacy system whether other systems store information about the same customer.

To transition towards an e-business, the bank has to deploy customer relationship management (CRM) and e-commerce applications, generally called customer-facing applications because they directly interact with the customer or a customer agent. Examples are sales support, marketing campaign management, content management, personalized recommendation, and customer self-service applications.

The customer-facing applications, although designed more recently and sharing common communication standards (CORBA, XML, DCOM, etc.), typically offer a point solution for a particular front-end business function like sales team support, customer email management, and personalized cross/up-sale offers.

They further compound the disconnected legacy system problem by focusing on discrete business functions.

Scenarios: A customer using the web-based brokerage system is locked out for several hours every night, because the bank needs to synchronize the brokerage system with its other systems.

A very valuable customer is being called by the collections department and asked about a late mortgage payment. Since the customer's mortgage is being automatically deducted from her checking account, she does not understand. More calls follow, the collections department insisting on not having received the payment, the customer claiming that the payment has been deducted. Finally, after receiving a letter, the customer realized that the bank has not received the monthly check for her home-equity loan / second mortgage. Since the collections department receives information only about the delinquent account, the call center agents could not know that the customer had a mortgage and a home-equity loan and many more accounts with the bank.

The mortgage department raises the monthly payment by 50% because of a billing error. It takes several months to resolve the situation! Obviously, the customer is not happy, but since the mortgage department is organized as a separate company, it does not share customer data with the other departments of the bank. So whenever the customer talks to an agent for any other bank business, the agent is not aware that the customer may be in a hostile state of mind towards the bank due to the unresolved billing error.

Challenges: The bank is faced with several challenges: The new customer-facing applications have to communicate with the legacy systems. Customer data has to be shared among all systems. Business processes have to be extended to include the new e-commerce functions. The bank has to integrate dozens of CRM, web and legacy systems. Most of the CRM and e-commerce systems capture new customer data like marketing campaign emails, sales contact information, service tickets, order placements, and merchandise shipping, fragmenting customer information even more.

Solution: To provide consistent, personalized interaction with a customer, every customer interaction must start with a complete picture of the customer.