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BMO Financial Group
CustomerConnect
Improving Customer Service and Productivity At Once
Challenge
There are many things that BMO Financial Group customers can buy - and for a while, there were almost too many to manage.
BMO Financial Group is a highly diversified financial services organization offering retail banking, wealth management and investment banking products and solutions through BMO Bank of Montreal, its personal and commercial banking business, BMO Nesbitt Burns and BMO Capital Markets. Over time, the legacy systems used to sell these products to customers had become cumbersome.
BMO service staff were spending a lot of time trying to provide customers with information about the many products and services. They found their focus blurred by having to navigate on their computers to various standalone applications.
The company needed a way to consolidate its product systems and establish an entirely customer-centric application to improve service at the counter and on the phone, while raising frontline employee productivity
Solution
CustomerConnect is a streamlined and integrated application that gives BMO's frontline staff enriched sales and service tools. It stands as the focal point for all sales and service conversations. With access to a complete view of the customer profile as well as new one-stop service functions, sales and service tools, calculators and information, CustomerConnect has significantly enhanced the customer experience.
Using CustomerConnect, a service representative - any one of 15,000 staff -- has access to information on one screen that enables him or her to answer customers' questions and offer products spanning the entire range of BMO product lines. Features of the application include:
- A summary screen of all customer holdings, balances and outstanding work items;
- A central sales area on the screen highlighting saleable products and detailed sales information in addition to employee sales tools;
- Built-in pre-approvals to enable speedier customer service and cross-selling opportunities for lending products;
- A shopping cart that stores products, prints legal forms and calculates and stores employee sales and service points.
Results
CustomerConnect was fully implemented by May 2007 after 18 months of development by 100 people. Every day, it now saves frontline service employees an average of 40 minutes - equivalent to adding 331 employees, with total annual benefits to BMO of $210 million.
With CustomerConnect in place, 16 per cent fewer transactions are required to serve a lending customer. Frontline employees need to consult customer information files 23 per cent less often.
The number of cross-selling offers increased by 1,050 between December 2006 and January 2007, even though CustomerConnect had rolled out to only 200 branches by the end of January. In pilot branches with the CustomerConnect application, BMO recorded a 51-per-cent increase in database entries for customer prospects.
Response to the role-enrichment element of CustomerConnect has been outstanding, with employees holding the overwhelming view that CustomerConnect has removed an element of routine from their jobs and enabled them to interact with more customers, more often.
Innovative use of technology
The CustomerConnect project is regarded as industry-leading because it was implemented as a continuous incremental process, rather than a one-time rollout as is the industry norm. It was the first time that BMO had used the incremental development process on this scale. It produced valuable feedback from customers and employees, and enabled the project team to identify technological and business issues at an early stage.
The scale and high degree of complexity associated with the CustomerConnect initiative made open, cooperative and collaborative work an absolute requirement for success. The project required the integration of strong and diverse technology partners, including some with competing interests.
Six back-end product systems were consolidated into one central user interface, requiring a pioneering effort to connect unlikely partners IBM and Microsoft, with their Websphere and .NET products. This unusual marriage of technology provided advantages in robustness and scalability.
Murray Sutherland, vice president of BMO Connect, Personal & Commercial Group, says: "I cannot emphasize enough the criticality of a strong partnership between technology and the business to the success of CustomerConnect. Just like a marriage, there are some bumps along the way, lots of honest and open discussions, tough questions and difficult decisions. The partnership we developed significantly increased our ability to have a good quality solution that met the needs of the business and delivered the anticipated benefits."
The adaptive technology integrated in the application has been hailed by Freedom Scientific, the makers of the industry-leading JAWS application for visually impaired Windows users, as best-in-class. It opens the doors for BMO to increase hiring of visually-impaired customer-service employees.
A 2007 CIPA Winner!
For its exceptional application of information technology to transform processes and bring benefits to its stakeholders, BMO Financial Group has been awarded a 2007 CIPA Gold Award of Excellence in the Customer Centricity, For Profit category.
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