CRM - August 2008 - (Page 45)

Money Lying Around? Targeted sales calls connect better with clients who invest more But BGI faces a challenge unique to hen all you hear are woes about the economy, it’s the retail side of financial services: hard to imagine any- “Since investors are going out to the exone’s in the position to change to transact with an exchangemake big investments. Barclays Global traded fund, we don’t [get] any of the Investors (BGI), a subsidiary of United transactional data,” Shehata explains. Kingdom–based Barclays Bank, has a “So essentially what we’re relying on unique retail division that sells to fi- is a lot of our profile data and behavnancial advisors, as opposed to institu- ioral data.” In November 2007, after exploring tional investors, in its Intermediary Investor Business (IIB) unit. The IIB four other solutions, BGI built its Prosteam sells exchange-traded funds pector tool on the dmEdge platform (ETFs) and iPath exchange-traded from Massachusetts-based direct marketing firm Direxxis. The imnotes to advisors through its plementation took three iShares business. But with The Prospector months, which Shehata says more than 200,000 financial he found “remarkable”— advisors in the market—on top tool helped other solutions, he says, of the struggling economy— facilitate a the IIB sales team had to make deeper customer would have taken three times as long. each call count. With more-targeted call For seven years, iShares ac- interaction. lists, the average salesperson count executives had been manually collecting data on prospects soon doubled conversion rates. Instead and existing customers: online activity of calling 100 people for 10 customer at the BGI Web site, calls into the con- wins, a rep could get the same results tact centers, and responses to direct from calling just 50. More important, marketing and email marketing cam- Prospector helped facilitate a deeper paigns. As the customer base grew, the customer interaction. “Our distribution sales team ballooned in size as well— model is heavily linked into maintaining and soon, data requests became over- a very strong relationship with our cliwhelming, says George Shehata, director ent,” Shehata says. Only then can BGI of CRM and analytics for the IIB group. educate advisors to sell more iShares in It was the responsibility of his team of larger volumes to their client base. As the sales force became more deanalysts to track, update, and deliver pendent on Prospector, they no longer data on new and existing clients. www.destinationCRM.com W needed to tie up Shehata’s CRM analyst team to help them manually generate lists. Instead, “analyst resources were freed up to work on other sales and marketing analytic projects, in addition to taking on more CRM development work,” Shehata says. According to employee reports, call preparation time was reduced by approximately 25 percent. Not only were client profiles more comprehensive, the Prospector presented the information in digestible reports. The dramatic efficiency was validated by the fact that, as Shehata observes, “everyone is looking at the contact profile report before they ever place the call.” From just a few clicks on a Web page, salespeople can derive a wealth of information, such as a client’s number and type of investments, Web-site browsing behavior, and type of account and account tenure—insight that allows BGI to find relevant information that suits the specific interest of each client. “The most non-tech-savvy users [can] do what our pretty sophisticated IT team was doing on the back end,” Shehata says, adding that the implementation itself put very little drain on the technology department. Moreover, the success of Prospector in the United States has motivated BGI to expand the solution to the European iShares team as well. Perhaps what’s most exciting is the fact that, despite current market conditions, sales personnel report that they are connecting better with high-profile clients who actually invest more. “Our salespeople say, ‘We found this client we didn’t know about before, who’s now going to invest $6 million,’” Shehata recounts. “And they found them through the Prospector.” —Jessica Tsai the payoff WITH DIREXXIS’S DMEDGE, BGI WAS ABLE TO: $ double its conversion rates; eliminate the need for analysts to create call lists for the sales team; reduce precall preparation time by 25 percent; earn higher-value accounts; and cut implementation time by a third. CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT | AUGUST 2008 45 http://www.destinationCRM.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of CRM - August 2008

CRM - August 2008 Contents Front Office Feedback Reality Check Customer Centricity The Tipping Point Maximum Security A Code Win Doesn’t Blow Forming the Platform CRM on Twitter CRM Class Is in Session Making CRM Mandatory for University Administration Required Reading Cover Story: Calling it Quits Wouldja Look at That? 8 Enterprise Strategies That Stick CRM Searches for Search All Lines Are Not Busy UC: As Easy as A-B-C Even Contact Centers Have Room for Improvement Money Lying Around? Secret of My Success Re:Tooling Scouting Report Pint of View

CRM - August 2008

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