Rebecca Gibson |
This article first appeared in the Summer 2017 issue of The Record.
Beyond Bank Australia, one of Australia’s largest customer-owned banks, aims to offer its 200,000 customers a consistent, high quality and personalised service. In the past, this was almost impossible because customer data was stored in various siloed systems and employees had to switch between multiple applications to find information when interacting with customers.
“The customer service representative was more focused on processes than on building a strong rapport with the customer, and could miss vital information,” says Robert Aitken, Beyond Bank CIO. “It could take more than 30 clicks to get the information required. Importantly, this meant the bank couldn’t see the underlying issues or reasons for customer behaviour, and therefore couldn’t capitalise on up-sell or cross-sell opportunities.”
Beyond Bank wanted to implement a low-cost, cloud-based customer relationship management (CRM) platform that would integrate with its core banking system to simplify workloads and provide comprehensive reports, marketing management and automation.
Working with Eclipse, a DXC Technology Company, Beyond Bank rolled out Microsoft Dynamics CRM integrated with Office 365 and SharePoint. DXC Eclipse used Microsoft Azure Service Bus to integrate the CRM platform with the core banking system and external data sources, streamlining and automating data sharing processes.
Now, employees can instantly access a 360-degree view of customer history, accounts, correspondence and portfolio information so they can serve people in a personalised way, both inside and outside of the bank. This is expected to increase intra-business referrals and sales per customer.
“The solution will give staff members more ownership of the customer relationship,” remarks Aitken. “We anticipate that this will lead to improved staff satisfaction and more motivated employees since they can contribute directly to organisational success.”
Moving to the cloud has also significantly reduced Beyond Bank’s total IT costs and minimised downtime.
“The cloud-based delivery model means we get upgrades and patches directly without having to wait for, and plan for, an on-premise upgrade,” Aitken says.
Beyond Bank is rolling out Microsoft Dynamics Marketing, Social Listening, Voice of Customer, Power BI and Azure Machine Learning so it can analyse customer data to better predict future behaviour and product demands.
Aitken attributes the project’s success to DXC Eclipse’s team of consultants who spent 18 months working with Beyond Bank’s employees to understand the company’s banking processes.
“By embedding its team in the Beyond Bank team, DXC Eclipse was able to proactively add suggestions regarding how to get the best possible results,” Aitken concludes. “This project is one of the most significant projects Beyond Bank has done in 10 years. This has been truly transformational and a real game-changer for the organisation.”