It’s much easier for a small bank to say that it’s the friendly place to do business than it is to actually accomplish that.
Just ask David Johnson III, chief operating officer of $2.5 billion (in assets) Corus Bank N.A., with $2.5 billion in assets and headquarters on North Lincoln Avenue. Though retail and commercial customers may expect much more personalized service from Corus than they might from a huge international bank, it’s still a tall order to expect all tellers and bank officers to instantly recall the name and preferences of each of its 100,000 customers.
Furthermore, the process of sifting through data to figure out which customers are most profitable, who would most welcome certain types of marketing material and even who should occasionally receive preferential treatment is a information technology project too big for bank Corus’ size. “Organizing data by customer and by organization units–nice idea, but it’s hard to do,” Johnson said.
“We like to have a program where a branch manager calls customers monthly. It used to be somewhat random, and now it’s balance-based, but we’d like it to be profitability-based,” he said. “Without a system to assess which customers are most profitable, it’s hard to make those calls. Profitability isn’t necessarily tied to the size of the account, so it’s incumbent on us to have some way to identify those customers and solve their needs.”
Enter M&I Data Service Corp., a Milwaukee-based firm that takes on complicated customer relationship management tasks for small and medium-size banks. By outsourcing their CRM, banks can order up just the bits of information they want for a particular marketing campaign, without investing heavily in computers and staffers. That gives smaller banks the same critical information as their huge competitors.
CRM experts say that outsourcers like M&I are likely to grow dramatically, equipping medium-size and smaller companies with the latest CRM tools. By serving numerous companies in the same industry, outsourcers can afford more sophisticated, technology than any individual client.
“Customers are getting into a more laser-guided approach,” says Rick Roy, an M&I executive. “Instead of sending a mailing to all their customers, they’ll target a particular product or service–for instance, people who’ve just gotten their first mortgages are 10 times more likely than the average person to buy furniture and appliances, and to get a consumer loan to do that.”
That quickly translates to the ultimate question that all businesses want to know about their marketing efforts, Johnson said: “All we want to find out was, was this a good effort for us or not?”
