Fleet Moving To Consolidate Leads Across SystemsFleet Moving To Consolidate Leads Across Systems

In the cutthroat financial-services industry, customer retention is paramount. FleetBoston Financial Corp. wants to leverage its customer relationships with a broad marketing-automation project aimed at increasing the number of products customers use by about 35%.

The $200 billion Boston financial-services and retail banking company wants the marketing tools to break down barriers separating its lines of business. This month, the seventh-largest U.S. bank will begin the first phase of a lead-management software implementation to help its business units cross-communicate. The ultimate goal: to improve relationships with and provide more services to new and existing customers.

That's a large undertaking, considering that since 1988, Fleet has acquired at least 10 banks, including the mega-merger in 1999 with Bank Boston. In 1998, the company acquired investment firm Quick & Reilly. So far, Fleet has done a respectable job of integrating the technology of the companies it's acquired, analysts say. But there are still numerous disparate systems within each of the company's business units that need to be linked together to allow the smooth flow of information.

To help achieve that goal, Fleet will install DemandMore Leads, a Web-based marketing and sales software package from MarketSoft Corp. that will communicate across the databases and sales-force automation systems from Fleet's separate business units--Quick & Reilly Investments, as well as mortgage, small-business banking, and the personal-finance divisions.

"We can improve the customer experience, so as customers come in and express a need in any of our offices, we can forward that lead to a community of offers," says Mary Ellen Baker, executive VP and managing director of consumer technology and operations at Fleet. That means connecting five customer touchpoints--the call center, service desk, branch locations, campaign-management application, and online self-service--within each of the four divisions to channel customer data throughout the organization.

With the new system, for example, mortgage representatives can use a Web interface to send to Quick & Reilly the contact information of a mortgage customer interested in investment advice. On a broader scale, the DemandMore software accepts inbound leads from customer touchpoints, such as customer-relationship management applications, the Web site, or legacy applications. DemandMore Leads prioritizes, routes, assigns, and delivers the leads to the sales-force automation system in the division where the most appropriate sales representative works.

Employees throughout all of Fleet's divisions can share customer data, both in real time and in batch mode, because the software is designed to integrate with marketing data marts, middleware, and databases. It also integrates with Web services over XML and CRM applications, including Onyx, Pivotal, and Siebel Systems.

"Right now, our lead management is manual," Baker says. Employees typically fax or E-mail leads across departments, and they have little knowledge of appropriate contacts and can't track what happens to the lead. In many cases, customers are lost in the process. "We don't have an easy ability to track all of that," Baker adds.

By automating the process, Fleet will have a closed-loop system that distributes and tracks customer leads. The application places an identifier, or "watermark," on each lead and follows that lead in real time as it moves through the sales-force automation applications. That lets the corporate sales and marketing department monitor what happened to each lead--whether a representative followed up with the customer and whether a sale resulted.

Sales representatives also can access databases from other divisions for more information about the customer to help close a sale. And sales managers will be able to monitor leads to make sure Fleet employees contact customers and address their needs right away--before they have a chance to turn to a competitor. When representatives don't follow up on a lead in a pre-set amount of time, it will be automatically routed back to the central DemandMore application to be redistributed to another sales representative.

One reason Fleet selected MarketSoft was that the vendor has experience integrating DemandMore Leads with existing third-party applications. Since each of its four divisions already has undergone a sales-force automation implementation from either Siebel or Celeris Inc., Fleet wanted to make sure employees could enter customer leads into existing systems. "It was key that MarketSoft could leverage existing technology, and that they had experience in doing so before," Baker says.

That's an issue for many financial-services companies that implemented customer-relationship management software expecting big paybacks, says Kim Collins, a Gartner analyst. "If we look at CRM in this industry, implementations were painful and returns weren't what they expected, so the banks get frustrated, saying it's the system," Collins says.

But often, the systems work fine; it's the cultural and organizational issues that prevent the company from maximizing its returns, she adds.

Mastering cross-organizational selling is an issue facing many financial institutions in the post-Gramm Leach Bliley deregulation era, analysts say. The 1999 law let banks merge with securities or insurance companies, sparking a string of mergers and acquisitions by companies such as Fleet.

But that industry consolidation has generated technical problems, as many financial-services companies have proprietary IT systems. The result: merged companies composed of disparate business systems that can't interact. That's made it difficult for the companies to serve customers or leverage their data.

"It should be an urgent project for financial institutions to share data across lines of business," says Octavio Marenzi, managing director at consulting firm Celent Communications, which focuses on IT for the financial-services industry. "Even within the bank, divisions have a hard time sharing information to the point where they have had to rely on customers telling them they have multiple accounts. Banks have had a hard time making that work."

Part of the problem for the industry has been cultural. Employees are unfamiliar with the workings of other lines of business within the organization and might not be concerned with sharing their customer information with what once was another company.

Fleet is working to overcome such issues as it phases in the lead-management technology. It's developing an education program to help employees spot potential leads for different parts of the company. It's also working out an incentive program that will reward employees when cross-divisional referrals convert to customer wins--a move that likely will make the implementation more successful. "This industry has pains because they have so many different lines of business all trying to coordinate and be more of a full-service institution," says Mike Kozub, chief marketing officer at MarketSoft. "But when service agents make suggestions based on knowledge, consumers are more interested."

The education leg of the implementation also includes privacy training. While the Gramm Leach Bliley Act makes it possible for cross-industry consolidation, the law also includes strict regulations governing how companies can share customer data. In 1999, Fleet began an extensive effort to make all its divisions compliant with the law (see "Privacy Law Requires Hard Work," Aug. 20, p. 52).

Under Fleet's privacy policy, employees will be passing leads and data across divisions only with the consent of the customer, a policy that not only keeps the company on the up-and-up with the government, but with the customers, too. "Institutions are trying to get permission from the customer to look at their data and then use it to better serve that customer. But they want the data to make better offers and cross-sell, too," says Shaw Lively, a financial-services analyst at International Data Corp. "If the mercenary aspect overrides the customer-respect aspect, the institutions will lose."

For example, if a bank learns through an investment broker that a customer has a mortgage at a competing bank and lures that customer with a lower rate, the customer might feel uneasy that the broker is handing over his or her personal information to another department. "But on the other hand, if the customer gets a better rate, it might not be that bad," Lively says. "It's a fine line."

Fleet will start to measure its success with the DemandMore implementation this summer when the first business units go live. Until then, Fleet will focus its efforts on education and integration.

"With Fleet, this undertaking is really a step forward that we're seeing many organizations interested in, but that have cultural and technical issues in getting there," says Gartner's Collins. "It will be interesting in six months to go back to Fleet and see how they've done."