Bank Invests In IT To Boost Customer ServiceBank Invests In IT To Boost Customer Service

The banking industry is working toward getting a holistic view of the customer across all channels. Citizens Financial Group Inc. said this week that it's taking early steps toward that goal with a planned $100 million IT investment between July 2003 and the end of 2005.

The bank, with $64 billion in assets and 2.5 million customers, will spend most of the money on a customer-interaction solution that will improve the quality and efficiency of one-on-one customer service in its branches and supermarket locations, particularly for customers opening deposit accounts. The stakes are high in this competitive market; an IDC Financial Insights report says that one in five customers switched banks last year, with 45% of the defectors complaining about poor service and another 20% citing perceived indifference by the provider.

With the project, Citizens executive VP and CIO William Wray says, the bank hopes to reduce by two-thirds the time it takes for customers to open accounts. "We make our money by providing world-class customer service," Wray says. The project matches the bank's philosophy that people sell and service customers, not software. "We need to give our people tools to get better in terms of sales and service," he says.

A core component of the $100 million investment will go to WebTone Technologies Inc., for its TouchPoint customer sales and service platform. WebTone is helping Citizens build an enterprise architecture that will link new customer-service and workflow-management applications with legacy systems. For this project, that means tellers and branch operators will have Web-based access to detailed customer information stored in an Alltel core-processing system that can be communicated via XML messaging through an IBM WebSphere MQ integration platform.

This is a better solution than many customer-service systems that require the user to replicate all data into the application. "TouchPoint goes after data that exists in legacy systems in real time," says William Proctor, WebTone's senior VP of product management and chief technology officer.

Current data needed only for customer service, such cross-selling opportunities, can be stored within TouchPoint so that it's more readily accessible to other CRM-type applications without going back on the mainframe. That will be useful when this project is completed and Citizens expands its customer-service initiative to other customer-interaction points, like the ATM or call center, modules that could be added by WebTone or another vendor. The ultimate goal will be to integrate all customer channels, so regardless of the access point the customer will have a consistent experience. "If everything flows through the same architecture, the customer information everyone sees is the same, so a branch [agent] could see that the customer in front of them uses online banking," Wray says. "The customers don't care that there are multiple silos behind all that data."

The investment also includes new hardware, such as printers and monitors, as well as training and change-management programs for the service agents that will be using the system, though Wray chose the technology based on its easily navigated interface. "Because we're moving to a more modern technology infrastructure, things are easier to use," he says. "We're trying to make this so that if you're going to sell to someone and open an account you don't have to go through arcane training. This is faster and easier, something that will make our employees happy." Wray says customers will appreciate content employees, and their loyalty to the bank will hopefully grow.