CRM in the financial industry
By: Jurgens Pieterse on 06/06/2000
While most financial institutions claim to be executing customer relationship management strategies, few can yet claim bottom line benefits. There are several factors that restrict the success of customer relationship management efforts.
Firstly most financial institutions have been unable to align their customer relationship initiatives to enterprise wide architecture strategies. Financial institutions still fail to operate from a list of coherent design principles. The result is diverse deployments of customer relationship technologies, without an enterprise design that reduces the total cost of ownership and the integration of various solutions. Integration remains difficult despite advancement in data integration and application integration technologies when enterprise architecture strategies are lacking.
Secondly most financial institutions are still addressing customer relationship management as a technology issue rather than a business issue. People and processes are seldom reinvented with the introduction of customer relationship management technologies. The business objectives for introducing customer relationship management technologies are often not defined nor measured in terms of customer oriented performance metrics.
Thirdly most financial institutions still lacks a passion for customers. Technology cannot replace a passion to provide customers with the highest quality of service. Return on investment for customer relationship management is only measured from the enterprise perspective and seldom measured from a customer’s perspective. Customer relationship management can only fully achieve its potential if it results in win-win strategies for both the enterprise and its customers. If a passion for customers does not pervade across the whole of the enterprise then customer relationship management is likely to deliver unsatisfactory results.
Lastly; “Most financial institutions are still climbing the steep e-business learning curve, with some struggling with under performing initiatives, some searching to see how their disparate initiatives fit together and some failing even to get their initiatives of the ground” says Rembert de Villa, an AT Kearney vice president.
