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National Bank of Canada
Management of Client Opportunities
Sales-Management Application Produces Big Gains at Low Cost
Challenge
In the networked economy there is more to selling than just good salesmanship. Salespeople need lots of information and efficient processes if they are to appeal to customers successfully. That's what the National Bank of Canada realized when it examined its low success rate in contacting clients to renew investments.
The National Bank of Canada, founded in 1859, has 17,000 employees serving 2.5 million clients from 455 branches and points of service. It has $117 billion in assets. Every day, some of those assets in the form of term investments mature or expire, and salespeople from the bank contact clients to see if they want to reinvest their funds or purchase new products. But the success rate for new solicitations was only two per cent and the bank realized that it had to update its paper-based sales processes.
It needed to improve its service quality by making client information more easily accessible to salespeople and standardizing the sales process. The bank also wanted to increase efficiency by facilitating communications with clients, speeding up report delivery and cutting paper costs to promote best environmental practices.
Solution
The Management of Client Opportunities (MCO) application was a small project by banking standards but has produced significant gains in efficiency and sales success.
MCO is a Java-developed application running on the bank's intranet and accessible to salespeople on their desktops. It provides a comprehensive overview of the products and services held by each client. Good client-management practices are shown on the screen and standard reports are included with predefined data fields that reduce data-entry errors.
More than 1,900 financial advisers and managers use the MCO to track maturities and expiries of financial products and increase sales on solicitations offered to clients. The application produces 16 reports such as Sales, Opportunities and Referral Summary and the Maturities/Expiries Follow-Up Report.
MCO permits managers to assign sales objectives to each sales adviser and track the results. All entries made by advisers are consolidated by branch and region and used to produce reports for all management levels.
Previously, all maturities/expires reports were processed in paper versions with limited feedback. Solicitations reports were sent to branches on paper with no feedback mechanisms at all. MCO has eliminated all such manual processing.
Results
At a cost of less than $1 million, the MCO generates annual recurring time savings for the Personal Banking sales force of between $6 million and $7 million. In addition, annual savings in printing and paper costs represent more than $600,000. The MCO application is estimated to reduce paper consumption by 120 tonnes annually, representing 2,730 trees.
The application makes it possible for sales advisers and managers to save significant time in administrative functions and focus more on business development opportunities. The success rate for solicitations has tripled, and quadrupled to eight per cent in some regions.
Timely access to information about sales results and the performance of some products enables managers to better track trends, make decisions and adjust their plans quickly. They can also project financial results for maturities/expiries and sales opportunities.
Innovative Use of Technology
MCO is the most successful application ever developed at the National Bank when measured by costs and benefits.
Developing the application in Java made it easy to integrate with the bank's existing infrastructure. MCO is accessible through a common secure portal linked to an Oracle 8.1 database. Users connect to the intranet just once and can easily move from one application to another.
Proof of concept for the application was accomplished with surprising speed through a pilot project involving only 10 sales advisers. Based on daily feedback from the group, the developers modified the application and measured its results. The Agile methodology, which promotes development iterations, was used to progress quickly by incorporating 20 iterations during the pilot project.
The performance rate, acceptance rate and satisfaction rate of the resulting application were so strong that the pilot project exceeded all expectations. The MCO application was offered to the entire sales force and 100 per cent of potential users have adopted it.
A 2007 CIPA Winner!
benefits to its stakeholders, the National Bank of Canada has been awarded a CIPA Silver Award of Excellence in the Organizational Transformation, For Profit category.
Technology partners
Microsoft Canada Co.
Oracle Corporation Canada Inc.
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