Nationwide is extending the use of its core customer
relationship management platform to let contact centre staff
handling inbound calls make more relevant offers to customers based
on information collected during the call.
The building society has also embarked on a related CRM project
to give contact centre staff access to self-service application
screens that are already available online to customers. It said
this would bypass some of the more unwieldy legacy systems that
staff have been using.
Nationwide has been using a Portrait CRM platform since late
2002 to manage its customer relationships. The system enables staff
to have more relevant and commercially productive conversations
with customers by generating targeted sales and service prompts
based on analysis of customer behaviour.
Since the introduction of the Portrait system, Nationwide has
run a scoring model against customer data to update its behaviour
profiles every month. It has now begun trialling a real-time
analytics tool from Portrait which should generate improved prompts
for staff to offer services, cross-sell or promote special
offers.
"The potential offered by Portrait's Interaction Optimiser
software is that for certain customers you will be able to
recalculate their score on the fly and get a better result than
previously," said Simon Baines, head of customer insight at
Nationwide.
"Until now, on the basis of batch-mode scoring, we have had to
decide all the things we might want to say to customers in advance
and draw up a list of priorities.
"We will still do that, but alongside it Interaction Optimiser
can now start running real-time rules to check if our original
priority list remains valid. If not, it can dynamically
reprioritise the chosen messages and even bring in other campaigns
or service offers that may not have made the original
shortlist."
Nationwide's contact centre and branch services are also being
improved by moving staff off legacy system screens to the
self-service banking screens that customers use online.
A live pilot in the building society's personal loans
application process has enabled staff to view the online prompts
rather than legacy screens.
"We are really keen on this initiative," said Baines. "Staff get
the immediate benefit of a slicker and faster system."
Nationwide is planning to roll out the system across other
product areas in the coming months.