Bradford & Bingley Keeps Over 200,000
Extra Customers Happy in CRM Project
For Demutualisation |
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| As part of its plan to convert from mutual status to become a public limited company (plc), British financial services firm The Bradford & Bingley Group had to ensure the quality and accuracy of the customer profiles held within its databases. Working with Innovative Systems, a customer information quality specialist for customer relationship management (CRM), data accuracy across 2.6 million members has been improved from 90% to almost 99.5% — enabling the firm to meet the legal requirements for demutualisation, and ensure over 200,000 extra members are correctly classified for share distributions. The automated data cleansing process saved the IT department some 100 man-years of effort! |
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| The Bradford & Bingley Group is the UK’s second largest building society with over 200 branches and nearly 180 local agents. The largest high street provider of independent financial advice, it has 630 independent advisors and is also the UK’s fourth largest estate agency with nearly 380 branches. |
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| As far back as 1993, Bradford & Bingley recognised the value of customer profiling and called on Innovative Systems, a leading supplier of CRM software, to provide a profiling solution. Innovative’s solution proved highly successful, allowing Bradford & Bingley to more effectively manage its relationships with, today, over 2.25 million investors and 350,000 mortgage customers. |
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| As a result of this past success, Bradford & Bingley immediately turned to Innovative when a new customer-profiling project arose in connection with the Group’s plans for demutualisation. |
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Accuracy Counts for Customer Service
Bradford & Bingley’s plan to become a public limited company created a new need to review the accuracy of its customer database. The Group is legally obliged to give every qualifying member a vote in such decisions. Moreover, when building societies become public limited companies, the value of the new plc is distributed to qualifying members in the form of shares. This meant Bradford & Bingley had to be able to determine its customers’ entitlement to vote and receive shares — a process that could be achieved only by using an extremely accurate customer database. |
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To ensure accuracy for the demutualisation process, Bradford & Bingley requested a formal data quality audit from Innovative. The result of
this was the disclosure that accuracy of the customer database had slipped to 85% to 90% of perfect. This was considered an acceptable level of accuracy for statistical and marketing purposes but not
for demutualisation. |
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| Steve Broadbent, Project Manager at Bradford & Bingley, explained: “For legal reasons our customer records must be as accurate as possible. We had already made great improvements using Innovative’s software, but needed to make further substantial improvements to satisfy our legal obligations for demutualisation. In addition, we wanted a solution that would enable us to deliver long-term database accuracy.” |
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| Bradford & Bingley aims for 99.5% accuracy by the date of the flotation and issue of shares to members. “This is an ambitious aim, since a level of 99.5% is generally unheard of because customer records are updated so regularly. However, we are confident that this goal can be achieved using Innovative’s solutions,” states Broadbent. |
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| From a CRM and member-friendly perspective this is good news too, says Broadbent. “By raising member record accuracy from say 90% to 99.5%, you can estimate that over 200,000 extra members will have been correctly classified for share entitlement. Imagine the dissatisfaction that might have resulted had several hundreds of thousands of members been either incorrectly classified or not notified of their demutualisation share entitlement rights!” |
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Accelerating the Clean-up Process
Already having a positive experience of the tools from Innovative through successful projects in the past, Bradford & Bingley again chose the supplier to assist in this latest database-cleansing project. Innovative proposed their data quality and data linking capabilities, a mix of products enabling Bradford & Bingley to expedite the clean-up and also to maintain the future accuracy of the database. |
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| The data quality capability enables customer profiling and analysis by identifying customers and their relationships to each other, standardising significant information, and flagging data inaccuracies within customer databases. This solution was chosen to help Bradford & Bingley gain an overview of the problems within its customer database so that it could plan the clean-up efficiently. |
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| The data linking capability identifies duplicate name and address information by identifying similar records despite misspellings, character transpositions, and missing information. It identifies duplicates by analysing word meanings and patterns within each record and selecting the appropriate information for matching on name and address data along with fields that Bradford & Bingley will define (such as date of birth and the role a member plays on an account). |
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| “The combination of these products enabled the Group to identify problems and duplication within the database and eliminate them automatically. This saved us many months of manual data sifting and checking,” said Broadbent. |
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Labour-saving Solution
Innovative’s solutions identified a particular problem with family members who shared the same name. In order to identify whether such records were duplicates, or just members of the same family, Bradford & Bingley wrote to all its customers asking them to confirm their details prior to the voting process. |
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| Broadbent explained the process: “When we asked our customers to check details, we received 2.3 million changes! The majority of these responses (1.4 million) were automatically scanned using Innovative’s products, while the remaining minority were sifted manually according to rules specified by the Group.” |
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| Using ordinary data sifting products, each incidence of a name would be flagged as a multiple and passed up for personal review by an operative. “However, using Innovative’s products, data is sifted according to an ‘accuracy threshold’ which compares records and only flags up records when it cannot define a match, saving us months of manual work checking potential duplicates,” enthused Broadbent. |
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| In the case of Bradford & Bingley it was estimated that it would have taken 200 people six months to check records manually. The same level of accuracy was achieved within weeks. “This allowed the Group to save time and money and proceed quickly to its goal of accurate, valuable customer data,” stated Broadbent. |
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| Ian Espiner, Head of IT for Savings and General Insurance, supports this view. It was Espiner who originally selected Innovative. He said: “I selected Innovative as the only supplier whose tools had the pedigree of achieving ‘operational’ levels of accuracy in very short timeframes. Most other data quality tools we looked at had come from a bulk-mailing environment. These would not have been suitable for the sophisticated uses we required.” |
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A Database for the Future
Now partway through the project with Innovative, Bradford & Bingley has so far raised the level of accuracy of its database to some 99.1% and is on target to achieve 99.5% accuracy — almost perfection. This increase from 90% not only satisfies the legal requirement for demutualisation, but also gives the Group accurate information that it can use for future marketing campaigns. |
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| By providing powerful tools for customer profiling and relationship management, Innovative has helped Bradford & Bingley raise the accuracy of its customer database to unprecedented levels. This investment will ensure the Group can satisfy its legal and marketing requirements, and will help it to offer a professional and personal service to its customers under a quality CRM programme. |
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