Customer Solution Case Study
/ / Bank Improves Communication, Enhances Customer Service with Collaboration Solution
Overview
Country or Region: United States
Industry: Financial Services
Customer Profile
Cleveland, Ohio–based National City is oneof the largest financial holding companies in the United States, working in commercial and retail banking, mortgage financing, consumer finance, and asset management.
Business Situation
The company wanted to improve its internal communication so that information delivery was faster and employees could be more knowledgeable about sales targets, new promotions, and relevant programs.
Solution
National City chose a portal solution based on Microsoft® Office SharePoint® Portal Server 2003, Windows® SharePoint Services, and Microsoft Content Management Server 2002.
Benefits
n More timely, accurate communication
n Enhanced employee satisfaction
n Better, faster customer service
n Increased customer base and revenue potential / “When I presented the new daily dashboard feature toa group of branch managers, they broke into applause. SharePoint Products and Technologies really came through for us.”
Mark Crowley, Senior Vice President, National City Corporation
Informing employees of changes to retail services, new promotions, and sales quotas can be a challenge, especially when those employees are spread across a large geographical area. National City Corporation—with 15,000 retail bank employees in 1,200 branch locations—suffered from the technical limitations of its intranet, and sending paper updates just wasn’t fast enough. Seeking a better way to communicate with and empower its staff, the company developed a portal solution to deliver role-based information directly to employees using Microsoft® Office SharePoint® Portal Server 2003, Windows® SharePoint Services, and Microsoft Content Management Server 2002. The result is improved employee knowledge, leading to better customer service and, ultimately, increased revenue as customers take advantage of thebank’s additional services.
Situation
One of the largest financial holding companies in the United States, National City Corporation operates through an extensive banking network in Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Kentucky, Michigan, Missouri, and Pennsylvania. Core businesses include commercial and retail banking, consumer finance, asset management, and mortgage financing and servicing. The company’s retail bank serves 3.2 million consumers and several hundred thousand small businesses that do business through 1,200 National City branches, three call centers, an online banking service, and a host of employees who provide a specialized sales or service function.
As part of the financial service industry, National City has to respond quickly to changing market conditions, communicating updated information to its approximately 15,000 geographically dispersed retail employees. Information can include everything from new promotional campaigns that respond to a competitive offer to a service issue affecting customers to news of robberies and other emergencies. In the past, National City communicated through a variety of methods, including teleconferences, individual telephone calls, weekly paper mailings, e-mail messages, and a limited intranet based on a Stellent product.
Technical limitations made it impractical for more than one employee at a time per branch to view the intranet site. Plus, the site could not be open at the same time as employees’ mission-critical applications. Often the most that employees could do was quickly scan the site’s headlines before closing it to open the applications necessary to serve customers.
Although it tried to keep employee knowledge current, National City had no way to disseminate updates to branch employees in a timely manner. Often, messages that applied only to a select group were sent to all branch employees because distributing information based on an employee’s role was difficult. “We didn’t have a good way to tailor communication to our different internal audiences—we provided either too much information or not enough,” says Mark Crowley, Senior Vice President for National City Corporation.
The company annually incurred paper costs of U.S.$300,000 for sending two packets of between 5 and 40 pages of critical information to each of its 1,200 branches every week.
National City wanted to find a way to foster internal communication that would improve the experience of both employees and customers. The company already had invested in upgrading its IT system for tellers, and now itset out to streamline communication to employees for even better customer service. National City predicted that branch employees could increase overall sales if they were given relevant, accessible resources and made more knowledgeable about current services and promotions as well as about the rationale behind the programs.
“Ours is a service business,” says Crowley. “Customers see an employee and think ‘you are National City.’ Therefore, we wanted to give all our employees what they needed to be able to fully respond to each and every customer.”
Solution
After evaluating its options, National City determined that a portal solution was the optimal choice for the communication that it had in mind. The company assessed several content management and portal solutions and, in July 2004, presented a select group of potential providers with a request for information (RFI) that asked for details about everything from index maintenance and site monitoring to desktop integration and application development requirements.
The company’s Fusion Technology Group, which delivers shared technology throughout the bank, reviewed the RFI responses and reduced the field to two candidates: IBM and Microsoft. Wanting to ensure an objective approach, National City developed a scorecard with explicit lists of criteria and asked both companies to build prototypes of their solutions for further testing and evaluation.
Ultimately, National City selected a solution based on Microsoft® technology, including Microsoft Office SharePoint® Portal Server 2003, Windows® SharePoint Services, and Microsoft Content Management Server 2002, which is part of Microsoft Windows Server System™ integrated server software. The solution provides a framework for business applications and collaboration that will support the company’s entire enterprise population, with Microsoft Office Professional Edition 2003 as the desktop standard.
“The integration with the desktop suite that is built into the Microsoft solution provides our retail users with a far better experience in comparison with competitive solutions because they have access to resources from within Microsoft Office programs,” says Bart Bischoff, Vice President and Group Manager for the Fusion Technology Group at National City Corporation. “Also, the integration in the Microsoft solution provided us with a shorter development timeline compared with the other solutions, which meant a quicker time-to-market.”
National City immediately saw opportunities for applying portal technology to its multiple lines of business and decided to start by reaching out to its retail bank branches. It setto work developing Retail OnLine, a role-based portal application for branch employees. The company also began working on the basic structure for an eventual enterprisewide portal.
With help from Microsoft Services consultants, National City completed development of the SharePoint Portal Server and Windows SharePoint Services infrastructure in approximately five months. Simultaneously, the company developed Web parts for the enterprise and the Retail OnLine application, which it made available to branches in March 2005.
National City uses Windows SharePoint Services as the internal communication solution across divisional units. A technology in the Microsoft Windows Server™ 2003 operating system, Windows SharePoint Services is accessible by the entire corporation and provides the primary project documentation repository. Through the use of the Active Directory® service and the company’s authentication process, National City can tailor content by geography or employee role, such as sending summaries of special promotions only to applicable regions and providing articles to employees in specific positions.
SharePoint Portal Server and Content Management Server operate as the application framework for the Retail OnLine application. Retail OnLine launched with six channels of internal communication content:
n Planning and Decision Making. A branch-level dashboard provides information about performance against critical incentive-plan measurements as well as access to dozens of management reports, tools to calculate customer profitability, and strategies to improve performance.
n Sales and Marketing. Retail OnLine provides real-time information on multiple corporate-sponsored promotions, all tailored by market. It also supports direct-selling efforts by capturing information and tools used at the branch level, including telemarketing lists, scripts, and mailings.
n Products. The solution provides a direct link to pricing, along with organizing a wealth of product information in an easy-tonavigate tabular format that helps employees prepare for sales efforts by reviewing detailed customer profiles and sales strategies.
n Procedures and Operations. Retail OnLine offers access to key operational information, including policy, procedure, audit, and privacy guidelines as well as compliance requirements. It also includes a guide to who employees can call to quickly answer customer questions.
n People and Performance. Retail OnLine provides access to up-to-date training offerings, requirements for all employees, and information about incentive plans, seasonal sales promotions, and recognition programs.
n News and Updates. The solution includes asearch tool to help employees find specific information, and it provides a single place where employees can view news articles.
Training branch employees to use the portal solution was easy. “We based the solution’s interface and navigation on user input and testing to make sure that its design would be easy for our employees to use,” says Crowley.
The response from users was overwhelmingly positive, especially after National City showed employees the breadth of use for the portal. “When I presented the new daily dashboard feature to a group of branch managers, theybroke into applause,” Crowley says. “SharePoint Products and Technologies really came through for us.”
Benefits
With its new portal solution, National City has a mechanism for providing branch employees with accurate, applicable, and accessible real-time information. By enabling employees to be more efficient, the company is giving them more time to serve customers. Helping employees stay knowledgeable about the bank’s services leads to higher employee confidence, satisfaction, and retention, while providing services more quickly and completely leads to increased customer satisfaction and, National City anticipates, increased revenue.
More Timely, Accurate Communication
National City can communicate with its branches more quickly and effectively than ever before. “Employees have detailed information at their fingertips, and they can easily stay up-to-date on their progress in terms of sales quotas and our internal incentive programs,” says Bischoff. “In fact, with the integration between the SharePoint site and our Office programs, employees can search for a key piece of information through the portal without closing their mission-critical applications—it’s as simple as a toggle between applications. Plus, we’re able to help our employees maximize their time by giving easy access to the information that applies specifically to them.”
The company also is using the portal solution to help employees impart valuable knowledge to their coworkers. The Share Your Thoughts program, accessible through the portal, is a way to learn best practices from some of the most successful branch employees at National City. “We want to encourage an environment of shared success,” says Crowley. “The SharePoint site gives us a greatavenue for our top salespeople to pass on tips that will help their colleagues be more successful.”
The employee education effort also extends to training. National City is making all its online training webcasts available through the SharePoint site so that new employees receive the same level of education as those who attended the original session.
Whereas employees used to wait up to a week to receive updates from National City headquarters, they now learn of events as soon as they happen. For instance, if an emergency forces a bank branch to close itsdoors, nearby branches can be notified immediately so that they are prepared for a higher-than-normal number of customers. “In emergencies, our employees will never be caught unawares,” says Crowley. “The SharePoint Portal Server solution helps us keep up with both planned and unplanned events.”
After four months of using the solution, National City analyzed Retail OnLine usage trends and found increases in average visits per day and number of visitors compared with the company’s previous intranet solution, even during a high vacation period.
Enhanced Employee Satisfaction
By providing all employees with improved access to the right information, National City is finding that its work force is more satisfied. Unlike financial service institutions that restrict teller access to information in order tokeep things simple, National City considers its tellers vital in the quest for increased market share. “Our tellers are our conduit to customers. Rather than limiting the amount of information that we give them, we need to trust them with resources and information that they can draw on to perform their jobs ina more strategic manner,” says Crowley.
Studies have shown that strong, positive connections to work usually result in more successful and loyal employees. And so National City is conducting Gallup Organization benchmark surveys of its employees to determine key ways of engaging its work force.
“We’re using the SharePoint Portal Server solution to empower our employees because we believe that they’ll be able to be more successful if they feel more productive,” says Crowley. “Our vision is to be recognized as the best retail bank—period. The more confidence our people have, the more likely they’ll contribute to that goal to their fullest. Using the portal solution to help serve customers better makes our employees feel good.”
In fact, National City hired a corporate communication consulting firm to measure employee response to Retail OnLine. Users gave it a rating of 3.91 out of 5, compared with an average response of 2.85 among employees using different communication solutions at other companies.
Employees used to spend a great deal of time trying to track down their individual sales results, but now a two-minute visit to the SharePoint site is all that it takes to get up-tothe-minute information on their status. “The change in my productivity and that of mycolleagues has been phenomenal,” says Stephanie Contipelli, Assistant Market Executive for National City Corporation in theChicago, Illinois, area. “Our ability to domore is made easier because we have so much information at our fingertips.”
Better Customer Service
Not only do employees appreciate the portal solution, but National City customers also reap its benefits in the form of faster, more accurate service. Branch employees no longer waste time on phone calls or wading through past e-mail messages to try to answer a customer’s question. The answers are available immediately through the SharePoint site.