World Leading Financial Services Firm Uses Extraprise to Nurture Private Clients for Growth

Client

Extraprise’s client is one of the world's leading financial management and advisory companies. Their customer advisory center (CAC) is part of the global private client group and sells to over 500,000 households and is a complementary channel supporting the broker’s brokers. CAC clients have less than $1,000,000 in assets.

The CAC’s business objective is to augment the broker channel by providing high quality, efficient services to the client’s smaller accounts. Its goal is to conduct profitable business with this market segment and nurture the clients to increase their net worth, thus moving into the broker’s more profitable high net worth segment.

In addition to servicing these accounts when requests or questions arise, proactive telephone contacts are made with customers on a semi-annual or more frequent basis in order to help customers best manage their portfolios and financial affairs. As accounts are developed, they are returned to the broker channel for continued monitoring and service.

Challenge

As growth in the division increased, and new sales and marketing initiatives began, marketing operations became strained and backlogs in developing and executing campaigns started to build. A better way to manage a multi-channel lead nurturing campaign was needed. Furthermore, many of the marketing systems had been cobbled together to fit into the CAC’s complex technology infrastructure and were beginning to strain under increased volumes. Marketing had additional plans to not only scale the system, but also to evolve system functionality.

CAC’s marketing automation is supported by a variety of marketing automation software and servers, such as SQL Server, Siebel Marketing, SAS and Quadstone. This system is populated by feeds from Siebel, the broker data warehouse, and other systems. This complex environment and increasing requests to the internal IT groups began to exceed available capacity, hampering the CAC’s ability to respond to customer needs and marketing opportunities.

Solution

Extraprise utilized its methodologies to guide the marketing assessment project, and a subsequent project, to stabilize and enhance the CAC’s marketing automation environment.

Marketing Maturity Assessment

The project started with the development of a high-level marketing automation assessment, which addressed marketing processes, organization, technology, governance, and strategy. In the assessment of the CAC, current operations and capabilities were reviewed against a marketing maturity model, including:

• Current marketing processes were documented
• Desired future state processes were engineered
• The organization was reviewed in terms of skills and abilities and overall resource levels
• Technology was reviewed to identify technical problems and potential system enhancements
• The governance issues of how the system is managed to predefined service levels was reviewed
• An overall strategy was developed to meet specific marketing goals and objectives.

One specific element of the marketing strategy was to implement a customer life cycle marketing framework. This model guides the interactions between the CAC and clients based on certain life stage events, such as a change in marital status, or birth of a child. In each of these instances, client interactions are scripted to guide the CAC representative to offer products and services that are likely to be of the highest value to the client depending on his/her unique life cycle event.

Aligning Sales, Marketing and IT

Development of the plan required close coordination with multiple units within the client including IT, business technology, and sales. During the execution, Extraprise again worked with the different organizational elements to complete specific project plan tasks. A substantial amount of the plan related to technical issues. Thus, even during the assessment phase, wherever possible, Extraprise provided immediate fixes to help stabilize operations and improve productivity. Examples of specific problems Extraprise addressed are:

• High cost and unreliability of complex manual processes
• Lack of audit trails and quality control procedures
• Technical issues delaying the upload of outbound calls resulted in reduced effectiveness and timeliness of the calls
• Difficulty in assigning outbound calls to the proper representatives

Solid Foundation for Future Growth

The overall goal of the project was to stabilize marketing operations and build a foundation for future growth. Existing operational and campaign processes were documented, with issues that impacted performance reviewed to identify resolution options. Extraprise then employed its knowledge of best practices of operating world-class database marketing operations to build ideal future state processes.

Extraprise also provided resources to reengineer and automate processes, resolve technical issues, fill critical skill gaps, increase bandwidth, and provide hands-on training to CAC personnel. Extensive efforts were taken to carefully document processes and ensure that proper audit and controls steps were included to improve process reliability. Furthermore, Extraprise worked closely with the client’s technical groups to help prioritize and balance requirements with resources.

Some of the specific solutions and enhancements included:

• Improving the performance and reliability of data loads to the SQL data mart
• Automating manual processes to support segmentation and list pulls
• Adding quality controls and audit steps
• Building tools that allowed operations personnel to develop new ad hoc list pulls, which previously required scheduling IT resources to develop
• Providing suggestions around interfaces to Siebel Call Center operation
• Improving the distribution of calls to call center representatives in terms of timeliness and optimization of assignment

On an ongoing basis, Extraprise provided resources to operate the system on the CAC’s behalf. As new processes are introduced and stabilized, where appropriate, Extraprise transfers knowledge to the CAC team to enable internal execution of specific operations. Upon completion of the improvements of the initial project plan, Extraprise was retained to provide ongoing technical support including problem resolution, system enhancement and operational support for database maintenance and campaign execution.

Results

Productivity has increased significantly, and the CAC continues to add new customer segments to its service base. Even as volume has doubled, the size of the group has remained relatively stable. Tools have been built which enable the operations group to modify list pulls in manners that used to require IT involvement, making the group more self-sufficient and conserving IT resources. Manual processes that used to be time-consuming, complex, and subject to error have been automated and now are executed in 40-66% less time. Going forward, the CAC plans on continuing its successful record of accomplishment and continue to add functionality, such as advanced analytics and reporting to its operation.