26/06/2003
Completes second phase of major technology project to enhance customer interactions
Nationwide Building Society is using Portrait from AIT to enhance its service to members and help to identify additional business opportunities. The technology underpins a major programme which aims to enhance the way the Society interacts with, and responds to, its 10 million customers. The key objective is to give employees the tools to treat customers as individuals across multiple channels and products.
“Nationwide’s mutual philosophy is to treat all customers fairly and as individuals. With the advent of Internet, telephone and mobile banking, the Society required a system that would enable its employees to achieve this across all of its channels. As such, this project is probably one of the largest enterprise CRM projects in this sector. AIT has delivered a system that has not only met, but exceeded our expectations in terms of performance and reliability and this is a huge achievement,” said Francis Walsh, Divisional Director, Technology at Nationwide
Building Society.
The first phase, called Customer Contacts, went live at the end of 2002. This involved the implementation of AIT’s Portrait software to give 12,000 employees at all the organisation’s branches and contact centres a dynamic single view of the customer. The second phase, which went live in May, introduces personalised sales and service messages to the system to enable employees to maximise new business opportunities. For example, if a fixed rate mortgage is coming to an end, the system will automatically prompt employees to remind the customer next time he or she makes contact, whether it be at the branch, call centre or in the future online. This was something the Society already encouraged, but with the introduction of this system, employees are provided with active prompts to follow up. This phase also provides Nationwide with workflow infrastructure, allowing employees to follow-up and track issues or activities through the organisation.
“We decided to work with AIT because it has a proven track-record providing comprehensive CRM systems to the financial services sector. There was also a synergy between our teams. The significant success of the project to date has ensured our high expectations of AIT have been met in full,” said Rudolf Heaf, Nationwide’s head of integrated CRM.
Nationwide is using open XML Web Services to speed up the integration of Portrait with existing systems. This has provided flexibility to build a solution based on its unique business processes.
“Companies looking to deploy enterprise CRM systems are often forced to choose between two extremes. They can either build their own system in-house to fit their specific requirements, or buy a pre-packaged solution that is often incompatible with its existing IT infrastructure and business processes. Portrait gives Nationwide the best of both worlds, by providing the benefits of both approaches, while side-stepping the potential pitfalls. The benefits include the lower total cost of ownership entailed in buying packaged software, combined with the look and feel of a tailored in-house solution,” said Nick Randall, CEO of AIT Group.
For more information about AIT, please visit the LEWIS Virtual Press Room at: http://www.lewisvpr.com/clients/ait.html or the AIT website at: http://www.aitgroup.com
NOTES TO EDITORS
About AIT:
AIT makes companies more successful by making them more responsive. Portrait, its Customer Interaction Management software (CIM), focuses on the most important part of traditional CRM: the point where it touches the customer.
Portrait helps business users and strategists design, model, deploy, manage and change the processes that drive customer interactions across all channels. By dramatically increasing a company’s responsiveness to change, Portrait helps win new customers, sell more to them and serve them better, while ensuring regulatory compliance. By mastering customer interactions, Portrait makes CRM work.
Portrait lets all customer data stay in the systems and data stores where it naturally lives so integrating with existing back-end systems is easy - even if those systems are changing. New configurations, new rules, new processes and new interfaces are generated in minutes instead of months.
The company has developed its specialist knowledge over 17 years, through successful deployments for its blue-chip client base. Customers include Alliance & Leicester, Bradford & Bingley, Britannic Money, First Data Europe, Lloyds TSB, Marks & Spencer Financial Services, Nationwide Building Society, NatWest, The Woolwich, Komercni Banka (Czech Republic), KeyCorp and Rainier Pacific Bank (US) and Benkar Advantage (Turkey). For more information on AIT, visit the website at: http://www.aitgroup.com
About Nationwide
Nationwide is one of the UK’s leading financial services providers. It has over10 million customers and over £85 billion in assets. Nationwide offers a range of products and services designed to meet members’ financial needs and maintains an extensive branch network. This is complemented by services available by phone, post, Internet using a PC or MAC, WAP phones, PocketPC PDAs and TV internet banking. Nationwide was the first to launch an Internet banking service in the UK, first to have an Internet banking service available through a TV and offered Europe’s first PocketPC PDA mobile banking service. Nationwide is a mutually owned organisation. This means it belongs to its members and is run for their benefit. It’s this mutual status that makes Nationwide different to the banks.
Nationwide offers genuine long-term good value, and gives members easy access to a wide range of products and services. For more details, visit the Web site at: www.nationwide.co.uk
For press enquiries, please contact Katy Lyons or Alex Olive at LEWIS, the IT PR agency:
Tel: +44 (0) 20 7802 2626
Fax: + 44 (0) 20 7802 2627
Email: katyl / alexo@lewispr.com
Internet: http://www.lewispr.com
For AIT sales enquiries, please contact:
Jo Bateman
01491 416 600
jo.bateman@aitgroup.com
