Breaking Down The Marketing Silos At BanksBreaking Down The Marketing Silos At Banks

MarketSoft Corp. wants to help retail banks improve the way they cross-sell to their customers. The marketing-apps vendor is expected Monday to introduce Referral Manager, a Web-based application that connects banks' lines of business so that customer-contact personnel can quickly transfer leads among departments electronically.

The goal is to end the guessing game for sales leads, says Mike Kozub, MarketSoft's VP and chief marketing officer. Traditional marketing to customers relies on predicting their needs. Referral Manager is designed to transfer actual knowledge about a customer need from one line of business to another. "Financial services is guilty of peddling the next product they think the customer wants," Kozub says. "With this, you're responding to what a customer tells you they want."

It works like this: A customer making a deposit in person might ask about retirement plans. The teller uses Referral Manager on his desktop to note the inquiry in the same customer profile that he uses to record the deposit. The teller will be prompted through qualifying questions that help direct the sales lead to the investments division. Managers can check the status of that referral at any time. Similar interfaces are customized for other customer-contact points, such as call centers.

While the application will be released this summer, beta users such as Fidelity have already tested the system. Referral Manager starts at $500,000.