ISI Helps Wachovia Bank Accelerate CRM
Wachovia Bank is an interstate bank holding company providing financial services to consumers and corporations. As one of the top 25 banking companies in the United States, Wachovia offers credit and deposit services, insurance, investment and trust products to consumers in Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Florida, and Virginia, and to corporations both in and outside the United States.
Wachovia has an attractive customer base. Customers turn to Wachovia as the place to find the best solutions to their financial matters. In order to keep pace with its customer expectations, Wachovia needed to fully understand its customers to enable appropriate treatment, pricing decisions, and customization of services.
The Challenge
Wachovia has grown rapidly. With its recent merger with several banks in Virginia and Florida, Wachovia added over 1.6 million customers to its existing 5.5 million customers and 12 million accounts. While this, and the other recent mergers are major accomplishments, with it comes the challenge of keeping track of millions of customers and accounts in separate customer databases. To complicate matters, the current technology lacked the flexibility, functionality, and capacity to maintain service performance Wachovia needed for sustained growth. Customer information from these disparate databases needed to be consolidated into one centralized database that Wachovia called the Consolidated Client Information File, or CCIF. Wachovia's major requirement was to ensure that this CCIF have the ability to provide timely and accurate information for sales, marketing and service initiatives. The CCIF was a key investment for Wachovia to grow its business and to provide the best service possible to its customers.
Balancing its growth objectives with its customer focused business strategy Wachovia's vision was to build a customer-centric technology framework. This framework, which places the CCIF at its hub, would provide integrated operational and decision-support data — aligned with the bank's overall Customer Relationship Management strategy.
Wachovia Turns to the Best in the Business
After assessing several companies to help with this monumental task, Wachovia turned to Innovative Systems as its partner to jointly develop its CCIF and help lay the groundwork for the next generation data warehouse. Wachovia wanted to avoid purchasing a "solution in a box," because it needed a more comprehensive solution than these typically provide. Off-the-shelf products would not provide the flexibility Wachovia needed. ISI provided Wachovia with a flexible solution: to partner together to build a database structure to enable CRM strategies. Wachovia chose ISI because the two companies shared a common vision in the area of CRM. Wachovia also recognized that through ISI's consulting expertise, its sense of architecture, and its best-of-breed data quality tools, it could help Wachovia make its vision a reality.
Wachovia and ISI Team Up to Accelerate CRM
Overcoming traditional IT barriers of disparate systems, Wachovia's strategy focused on building the operational CCIF in conjunction with a data warehouse. The database solution created by ISI and Wachovia would create a common definition of customer between the CCIF and the data warehouse, enabling end users enterprise-wide to provide customers with consistent treatment. Customer information from branch to branch would also be accurate and consistent. According to Ted Hubbard, senior vice president of customer and financial systems at Wachovia, "We created this common framework in order to take decision support data and make it actionable. Now that we have a consolidated infrastructure, we're positioned for growth."
ISI Helps Wachovia Build Enterprise-Wide Framework
ISI helped Wachovia build a conceptual model to define the business issues impacted by customer information. A logical data model was then developed — taking the conceptual model a step further by adding in data elements. From this logical model, ISI consultants worked with Wachovia to build a physical database for both the CCIF and the data warehouse. The framework is called the ISI-Client Relationship Manager™ or ICRM.
The ISI Client Relationship Manager (ICRM) is the underlying database architecture for managing customer relationships consistently across an organization. Together with ISI's data quality and linking capabilities, this database provides a flexible architecture for the rapid deployment of CRM. Because the components are already integrated, the solution can be implemented quickly as a customer information file (CIF), operational data store (ODS), and/or a data warehouse. Its powerful knowledge base manages customer information throughout the customer lifecycle (lead to prospect to customer to ex-customer).
ISI Provides Wachovia with Unparalleled
Customer Information Management Tools
Wachovia knew that in order to make the consolidation a success, it was critical to keep the information within these systems accurate and up-to-date, so Wachovia ran ISI's data quality and linking capabilities on the data coming in from the newly acquired banks. The tools flagged data inaccuracies and ambiguities on this customer information, and reformatted and standardized it. This solution enabled Wachovia to perform customer profiling and analysis by identifying customers and their relationships to each other. ISI's data cleansing dictionary was customized to Wachovia's unique data conditions and matched to its business rules. Wachovia runs ISI's linking capability on an ongoing basis to ensure that its data remains free of contamination. "We're very satisfied with the functionality of ISI's solutions. ISI's data quality experience provided us with confidence that our customer information was accurate and up-to-date," said Hubbard.
Benefits of the Consolidation
Wachovia met its objective to consolidate all of the databases within an extremely short period of time. The first conversion of one of the branches took place over one weekend.
What was even more impressive to Wachovia, was that the conversion was seamless enough to avoid re-training end users, another major concern when the project started. End users reported that they could not tell the conversion of the database even happened. Hubbard said, "and we have yet to find any capability that can't be supported by this database solution."
Since the consolidation, day-to-day operations have exceeded Wachovia's expectations. For example, the response time was 1.4 seconds at peak rates (300% the rate of normal transaction volume) before the project began. With the new database implementation, the same mix of transactions took .74 seconds — half the time. What's even more impressive, the bank's overall database size has increased by more than a third, yet the performance is markedly improved.
Next Steps
ISI's and Wachovia's shared vision and common definition of "customer" is a fundamental key support factor to the next phase of Wachovia's CRM strategy — to build the next generation informational data warehouse. According to Hubbard, "At the heart of this initiative is the customer. Once this phase of the project is completed, we'll have the foundation to sustain and improve our tradition of customer-focused sales and service for years into the future."
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