At Bank One Corporation, the nation's fourth-largest bank holding company with assets of more that $260 billion, real-time response to customer inquiries is not only important, it is critical to the bank's success. Bank One offers a full range of financial services to commercial and business customers, and consumers, including traditional lending, treasury management, investment management, corporate trust, international shareholder, corporate finance, and/or private banking. With such a wide array of services, Bank One employees must be aware of their customers' individual needs and be able to address them as quickly as possible.
"Internet-related deadlines were being missed, customers were not being contacted in a timely fashion and Bank One was unable to accomplish its goals of retaining customers and generating new business," said Todd Albery, Senior Application Analysts at Bank One Corporation. "In today's market, immediate, quality customer service is expected, and it is essential to Bank One's success. Our initial solution was to use a spreadsheet to keep track of each customer and their diverse needs, in order to provide appropriate assistance. But after careful consideration, we realized a spreadsheet would not be sufficient."
In an effort to streamline the customer inquiry and reply process, Bank One developed the Leads Management System (LMS) and implemented it within the bank's Internet Mortgage Group, the department that manages all online and e-mail mortgage leads. Because of its numerous Internet partners, and the overall increasing use of the Internet, Bank One had customer leads coming from all over the world. The company went from receiving 10-12 leads per day to 200-300 leads daily. Staying organized became a major concern for the Internet Mortgage Group, which needed a system that could track the steps and follow each lead from beginning to end to meet the hundred-leads-a-day demand.
Bank One's next move was to turn to PowerFlow, a workflow and automation solution from Axceler Tools.
"PowerFlow is a perfect fit with the LMS, providing Bank One with the ability to follow each customer lead through different stages and to automate some of the essential steps," said Albery. "Without PowerFlow, handling 200-300 leads in a day would have taken considerable effort and organization. PowerFlow eliminates the 'daunting' quality of that task, and channels customers to the correct mortgage representatives, at the right time, in order to quickly process their information."
As soon as a customer lead or inquiry comes into the LMS, PowerFlow receives the inquiry and automatically routes it to the appropriate location, such as the "assign a loan officer" phase. The system immediately finds a loan officer who is available at that time to address the inquiry. PowerFlow then sends an e-mail back to the customer, informing them that their inquiry is being processed by loan officer "John Smith" and they will be contacted within "24 hours." The inquiry is then automatically moved to the next phase, and any change in status is indicated.
For Bank One, PowerFlow's biggest attribute is the alerts that it generates. If a customer lead comes into the system that is not processed quickly enough, an e-mail alert is sent to the loan officer assigned to the inquiry, or in some cases that loan officer's manager.
"Productivity and efficiency have increased, and by automating processes, we have reduced costs. Furthermore, employees are managing an exorbitant amount of leads without experiencing system errors or glitches," commented Albery. "PowerFlow allows us to rapidly meet our customers' requests. Each time we efficiently fulfill our customers' needs, we re-establish a bond with them and solidify Bank One's reputation as a customer-focused company."
While Bank One continues to experience success with PowerFlow within the Internet Mortgage Group, the company is planning to also implement PowerFlow in both its Home-by-Phone Mortgage and Retention Groups, in order to attain similar levels of efficiency and customer satisfaction.
"Customers are no longer waiting for us to respond," states Albery. "Leads come in and immediately get processed. PowerFlow is the critical enterprise solution that is setting us apart from the competition."
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