H&R Block Culls Tax Crowd And Finds Wealth Of ProspectsH&R Block Culls Tax Crowd And Finds Wealth Of Prospects

H&R Block Inc. has been busy talking to about 21 million taxpayers as today's April 15 tax return filing date arrives. For some of them, after Uncle Sam gets his due, there's still an H&R Block representative who wants you.

Each year, millions of potential clients for investment advice appear during the rush of tax season, then disappear from H&R Block's offices. A wealth of information on a prospect's finances accrues from the contact at tax time. The tax preparer knows whether the client has just bought a house, gotten married, or had a baby. Careful use of this information can lead to more business for H&R Block Financial Advisors Inc., the company's financial-investment-advice unit.

Since it implemented a Client Acquisition System in January, H&R Block believes this tax season that fewer of these potentially valuable prospects are falling through the cracks. It built CAS using a services-oriented architecture approach, which means it's more likely to succeed than its two cumbersome and ineffective predecessor applications, says Scott Thompson, senior architect for H&R Block Financial Advisors.

Using a customer's tax data raises privacy issues, which H&R Block meets head-on. "The customer has to explicitly sign a permission form that his tax information can be shared with another line of the business," Thompson says.

He won't say exactly how many tax customers sign the form, but he acknowledges that more than 10% of the people coming through H&R Blocks' doors for taxes are interested in receiving investment advice. H&R Block has to cull the most promising candidates from the many customers who sign the permission forms for follow-up contact by investment advisers.

In the past, H&R Block managed these leads by entering them into a Goldmine prospect-management system from FrontRange Solutions Inc. or Clarify, a lead-management system now owned by Amdocs Ltd.

But these applications didn't connect well to the many sources of outside information that the Financial Advisors unit used to evaluate prospects. In addition, there was the chore of getting the most qualified prospects out of the lead-management systems and into the hands of the 1,000-member staff of the advisory unit, some of whom worked in home offices. Ten IT staffers were dedicated to maintaining the applications with their many specialized connections, which Thompson says was "an enormous maintenance nightmare."

H&R Block learned from its experience, and CAS was built as a Web service that relies on other services, both inside and outside H&R Block, Thompson says. The services are used to determine whether a lead is a good prospect for follow-up. CAS retrieves and summarizes previous tax returns, checks credit ratings, checks for the nearest H&R Block Financial Advisors office, and performs other services--15 in all per lead, Thompson says.

CAS uses Tibco Software Inc.'s BusinessWorks business-process-integration software to complete the checks on the customer lead. Most of the lead-management evaluation is now automated and takes less staff. With its SOA approach, Thompson is able to maintain CAS operations with three IT staffers.

CAS takes the assembled information and evaluates it using rules built into a rules engine developed by H&R Block, then forwards the results to the company's customer-relationship-management system, MicrosoftCRM, where they can be accessed by individual advisers.

But Thompson also needed to know that the 15 checks performed by CAS were delivering results as leads moved into MicrosoftCRM. Because it was dealing with so much information from a long list of prospects, there were inevitable "exceptions" in CAS's processing--leads for which the standard evaluation methods were not working.

Relying on Web services meant "HTTP-related errors were very difficult for us to detect," Thompson notes. If a service used in evaluating a lead stalled, a prospect might not be accepted or rejected, and Thompson's IT department would be in danger of not living up to its service-level agreement with its users in the Financial Advisors unit. It's supposed to deliver leads that are individually referred by tax preparers--the most promising prospects--to Financial Advisors within 24 hours.

To guarantee that level of service, he added another piece to his services-oriented architecture. He employed AmberPoint Inc.'s Exception Manager, a Web-services-management system that looks for service breakdowns and exceptions. Exception Manager, for example, knows not to forward the tax return of an H&R Block employee to another employee in Financial Advisors.

"Now we're able to keep up with the volume of data we're receiving from the tax side," Thompson says. Instead of needing 24 hours to deliver the most favorable prospects, the job is usually done "in a few seconds, or a few minutes," he says.

And because CAS is built with a services-oriented approach, few changes will be needed to use the lead-generation capabilities from the tax side in other parts of the H&R Block business, such as its mortgage unit. That's different from the way it used to be with prospect-management applications operating as silos. Without a services-oriented architecture approach, Thompson says, "it's harder to support changes to the system without breaking it."