Derbyshire spearheads its customer service strategy with CRM and workflow solution

Clientwise and Workwise solutions to streamline and enhance service at The Derbyshire's Customer Services Division.

Managed Solutions add support for Microsoft SQL Server 7.0 to product suite.

May 23, 2000 - Dublin, London - The Derbyshire, the UK's tenth largest building society, has gone live with integrated Clientwise CRM and Workwise workflow from Managed Solutions, the leading supplier of customer enterprise technology to this sector.

The implementation, which begins the process of automating The Derbyshire's entire front office, represents one of the key components for their new customer care strategy. Operating at the society's newly established customer service centre, Careline, Clientwise and Workwise now provide instant access to customer information - integrating it with task management and completion work needed to support customer service.

With unified customer information available to customer care and administration staff, The Derbyshire's internal research indicates it will increase customer satisfaction, improve customer retention and enable overall growth. Research company Meridien estimates that a 5% rise in customer retention can result in as much as an 85% rise in profitability.

Clientwise and Workwise have been implemented at The Derbyshire for an initial 60 users over a six-month period - much faster than is normal for an enterprise system of this size - where similar implementations have been known to take over two years. The society expects its entire branch network to be enabled with Clientwise/Workwise over the coming months. Managed Solutions believes that the integration of this solution brings The Derbyshire one step closer towards its vision of fully integrating the front and back office within retail financial services.

By deploying Clientwise, The Derbyshire's Careline staff now have direct access to a single source of all customer information, which supports all types of direct-to-customer operations. For example, the enhanced campaign management module will allow Careline advisers to link leads, contacts and tasks to a specific campaign, facilitating analysis of campaign effectiveness to a very low level of detail.

Meanwhile, Workwise, the workflow module, automates and manages task generation - eliminating the manual passing on of tasks from department to department. It provides The Derbyshire with real-time reports on service levels and overall administration performance.

"This integrated solution is an enabler. It enables us to better understand our customers' needs and truly put them at the heart of our business. By using this solution, we are able to get closer to our customer and give added value to the service we provide them." said Derbyshire Project Manager Simon Theobald.

"To maintain competitive advantage in the financial services industry it is vital that organisations adopt a customer-centric business model," said Michael Kelly, Managing Director, Managed Solutions. "By providing ready, consolidated customer information to customer care, administration and marketing departments, our solutions significantly reduce the average time taken to handle customer and account enquiries. This will help The Derbyshire to move their business from an account-based to a truly customer-based operation."

As well as combining information from different sources, Clientwise is scaleable to provide scope for the future expansion of customer contact channels such as the Internet and digital television and will support The Derbyshire's requirements to become an e-business society.

SQL Server Support Added
Managed Solutions has also announced that as part of the implementation, it has added support for SQL Server 7.0 to its product suite. Indeed, later this year, Clientwise and Workwise will be adapted to run on the Microsoft database at The Derbyshire. This enhancement effectively makes Clientwise/Workwise a universal solution for financial services.

"Clientwise and Workwise were the applications we wanted. Now that it will operate on SQL/Server 7.0, our database of choice, we're happy that we are maximising our technology resources for the greatest customer benefit," says Simon Theobald.

Michael Kelly adds: "We wanted to leverage the strong industry support for Microsoft BackOffice, as well as offer a comprehensive solution to those clients who look to Microsoft for important elements of their database, networking and development infrastructure. In this case, The Derbyshire operates a Microsoft technology environment, and wanted a solution which would integrate seamlessly with their Microsoft Office and Microsoft BackOffice systems already in use."

Richard Horsfield, Microsoft UK's financial services industry manager, says that increasingly in the financial services industry, Microsoft is becoming customers' platform of choice. "Key benefits of Microsoft technology - namely rapid, cost-effective deployment, and easy integration with back office systems, are extremely important to financial institutions," says Horsfield. "Organisations such as The Derbyshire have recognised the need to distinguish themselves from the competition through customer service excellence, by quickly launching new channels to market and investing in powerful CRM and workflow solutions."

The Derbyshire's investment in CRM and workflow systems reflects trends within the global financial services industry where, according to research consultancy AMR Research, the CRM software market will expand to $16.8 billion by 2003, up from $2.3 billion last year - a whopping 50 percent compound annual growth rate. Indeed, a study released by Andersen Consulting in March, 2000 found that as much as 64 percent of the difference in return on sales between average- and high-performing companies is attributable to CRM performance.