One of Australia’s largest 100% customer-owned banks has put people before profit for more than 60 years. With humble beginnings, the bank now has more than $7 billion in assets under management and over 260,000 customers.
With a national footprint, the mutual bank operates corporate offices and branches in metropolitan centres and regional areas across Australia, and offers personal and business banking, including banking services for the community sector, wealth and financial planning services and insurance.
The bank’s continued aim is to create and return value for its customers and communities, with an overarching focus on customer experience underpinning everything it does.
The transformation journey
The bank was using multiple, disparate databases and industry-specific approaches across the business. This created a complex network of software applications that slowed down the bank’s processes and made it almost impossible to deliver a consistently outstanding level of service. Team members had to access 15 different screens and click up to 26 times to piece together information to understand their customers. Wanting to know more about its customers, the bank needed to achieve stronger integration between internal and external systems.
A number of years ago, DXC Technology worked with the bank to successfully implement Microsoft Dynamics 365 to extract real-time customer data from core banking processes and applications and provide a single customer view. The initial project focused on digital transformation, business efficiencies, and establishing the core enablement for the bank’s CRM strategy.
The DXC Practice for Microsoft helped transform customer experience by developing a modern cloud-based CRM solution tightly integrated with Microsoft 365 and SharePoint to store, retrieve, and co-author customer documents. Employees were provided with instant access to a single, consolidated view of customer history, accounts, correspondence, and portfolio information for more personalised interactions.
The new 360-degree customer view significantly improved customer experience and employee accessibility and usability; replacing the previous approach requiring multiple disparate systems, manual intervention, and time-consuming processes.
The Application Delivery Manager for the bank, explained, “We have nearly 400 people logging into our CRM every day. Every customer interaction starts or ends there. We do around 5,500 API calls daily, so it’s an incredibly heavily used system central to our business.”
While the bank always enjoyed strong relationships with its customers, the new CRM solution allowed team members to understand customers better and puts the information needed at their fingertips for better interactions every day. In addition, choosing a cloud-based solution means employees can access data anywhere, anytime, from their mobile and tablet devices - with the ability to quickly and easily sign-up new customers immediately.
Continuing platform optimization
The bank recognized the initial CRM project as a key driver for growth without increasing future business costs: providing transparency for future opportunities, boosting efficiencies, and allowing employees to work smarter.
Since then, the Dynamics CRM has not stopped evolving, with ongoing work to ensure the bank leverages improvements via software updates and maintains compliance with constantly changing industry regulations. Ongoing system enhancements allow the bank to continue building and maintaining customer confidence and data security, which is vital for upholding customers’ trust.
The Application Delivery Manager said, “The pace at which banking changes forces us to stay current and keep identifying new or better ways of doing things. Our customer experience must be as good as it can get.”
The recent integration of Microsoft Power Platform to provide richer customer experience via an embedded Canvas App (Exceed) is proving transformational. DXC embedded the highly graphical user interface into the customer screen to provide staff with a tool to simply capture customers’ financial position and have informed conversations about life goals.
It translates customer goals into viable product selections with visual cues and guides, enabling a better understanding of customer needs and prompting discussions to meet them.
The Application Delivery Manager commented, “One of our core purposes is to change people’s lives. To do that, we need to understand them fully to help them meet their financial goals. Having a process to support customers on an ongoing basis is vital. That includes simple ways to review their banking and make sure it’s working as well for them as it possibly can.”
Another example supported the recent regulatory changes around complaints handling to ensure collection of the correct information, timeliness of response, and a smooth approach when dealing with complaints.
The Application Delivery Manager said, “We’ve been capturing our customer complaints and feedback since the original implementation and have continued adapting and improving that process. DXC was able to do a quick refresh to increase the visibility of complaints in progress in response to the new regulation. That change makes it easier for staff to maintain compliance when they are dealing with complaints. In this industry, reputation is everything, so it’s essential we do everything we can to help our agents maintain compliance 100% of the time.”
Some of the other work DXC has supported includes:
- Customer voice functionality to allow integration of feedback via automatically triggered customer surveys. Survey responses are visible on the customer’s profile, with customer experience team members also able to monitor responses.
- Integration with telephony system and phone routing based on caller selection, so agents have immediate access to the full customer record. DXC customized components to support authentication of the customer into the core banking system.
- SMS integration for bulk payment reminders to significantly reduce manual workarounds (spreadsheets created and uploaded to a separate SMS system). This new automated process should reduce costs and positively impact customer experience further.
Value delivered
Simplifing and reimagining business processes
The bank has reduced the time taken for staff to serve customers while improving compliance and the ability to respond to regulatory requirements. The Application Delivery Manager said, “With DXC’s help, we’ve been able to use our CRM to do things other systems aren’t capable of. If there is a requirement, process or policy we can build into what we’re doing, and it means staff don’t have to think about it - then we do it. My work is customer-focused processes, and CRM is central to that - as is helping improve employee experience and supporting them to be as efficient and effective as possible.”
For the bank, simplifying and reimagining the business processes translates to employees being empowered to support other incomegenerating tasks and services. The organization is growing, so as processes improve, team members can spend their time on new activities to help support that growth.
The Application Delivery Manager commented, “The CRM’s functionality has completely transformed how we work. The potential for the bank is enormous, as we learn more and more about the system and more and more about our customers. We collect data at every interaction point, but importantly, we are now using that data to make exponential improvements to our interactions. It’s given us a great framework and central point which we will continue to build upon.”
A strong and supportive partnership
As a trusted partner with a long-term relationship, DXC has helped the bank achieve continuous application modernization, integration improvements, and process automation to boost efficiencies and market competitiveness. The relationship is two-way, with the bank reaching out to DXC for guidance on new requirements and DXC proactively suggesting enhancements for the bank to consider. DXC provides ongoing managed services via a 24/7 support agreement, maintaining a steady presence since the initial project went live.
The Application Delivery Manager concluded, “I have no doubts about the quality of work that DXC does - our relationship is outstanding. The team is reliable and always contactable, even on a Good Friday (as we learnt this year)!
“We are very fortunate with our relationship and still work with many DXC team members that started with us. One individual still works in our office as often as she can. Her knowledge of our business and ability to bring new functionality to life are crucial components of the ongoing CRM success.
“We will continue leaning on DXC to help us stay current and suggest new enhancements. They’ve been instrumental in helping us get to where we’re at today. I can’t speak highly enough of the value the team has brought to our organization.”
Application Delivery Manager at Australia's largest Mutual Bank
The future
The bank will continue leveraging the Microsoft stack across the business with many new projects in the pipeline, relying on DXC to simplify processes, reimagine ways of working and accelerate new functionality into the bank. The capability of Power Platform in meeting new challenges and its ease-of-use in analyzing data, building solutions, automating processes and creating virtual agents is also recognized. The ability to easily create dashboards and visual cues is helping develop a culture of innovation so the bank can realize untapped value previously not accessible. The internal team has recently added additional resources to further leverage Power Platform for process automation across the rest of the business.
The Application Delivery Manager concluded, “I’m excited about the next two years when we will really leverage Power Platform to enhance business processes and incorporate bots and virtual agents to modernize our processes further.
“We will continue leaning on DXC to help us stay current and suggest new enhancements. They’ve been instrumental in helping us get to where we’re at today. I can’t speak highly enough of the value the team has brought to our organization.”
