To keep ahead of the competition while maintaining high profit levels, banks and relationship managers today need to provide a high level of personalised services to retain existing and attract new customers. To deliver value-added advice and responsive service across all business lines, relationship managers need a sophisticated, collaborative solution that provides a holistic view of the client, while leveraging operating efficiencies.
Odyssey's ‘Collaborative Advice & Contact Management’ business component aims at efficiently and more systematically supporting three key relationship processes prevailing in Private Banking:
- advisory process
- informational process
- sales process
The business component makes each of the above mentioned processes much more efficient so that the workload required to adequately serve a potentially large number of clients is greatly reduced. It also allows banks to document the rationale of advice more systematically. Finally, it improves the continuity and effectiveness of client follow-up helping relationship managers prioritise contact and action items.
Collaboration Model >>>
The business component employs a unique workflow-based collaboration model, allowing the relevant experts at the bank to collaborate and share expertise and to deliver the timely provision of personalised advice and information to the appropriate clients using the fastest and most appropriate channel. Supported by the entire organisation, relationship managers are more able to anticipate needs and define the right circumstances in which to proactively advise and inform their numerous clients.
A key element of the business component is the centralised collaborative engine, which allows relationship managers to exchange advice or information and prepare sales campaigns with the support of workflows in a secured environment. It can extend this process to many co-workers thereby ensuring that all departments work together to deliver the greatest possible value to the client. Any collaborative model can easily be represented and tailored to the requirements of the bank (See section 1 CDM > Organisation modelling).
Standard collaborative workflows >>>
With the aim of efficiently and more systematically supporting the provision of advice, information and products. The business component is delivered with several standard collaborative workflows to control the way in which multi-user processes are conducted. Collaborative workflows allow the initial information to be collected and enable the various teams of the bank to work together to elaborate the content, targeting who receives the advice and managing advice delivery through the client contact process. The standard workflows that a bank can easily customise to its specific needs include:
- advisory provision
- information provision
- sales / marketing campaigns
Advice and Information Provision >>>
The business component includes a workflow-driven Advice and Information facility, which allows users to elaborate the content of personalised advice and information that is addressed to large numbers of clients. To achieve this, the relationship manager is able to select from a series of standard pre-defined advice templates that are used to:
- document the advice rationale
- select the target clients using the multi-criteria query
- execute the advice procedure from a standard workflow
- execute a further workflow to control the follow-up process
The manual input required is limited to the description of the advice rationale. The description is only entered once but is applied to all the selected clients.
The pre-defined advice templates include:
- general advice
- trading recommendation
Additional templates can be added through on-site customisation. Any department, including the relationship manager, can create advice content. Similarly, the information or requests sent to clients can be personalised.
Sales and Marketing Campaigns >>>
The Sales and Marketing Campaign facility allows users to create and manage a sales process for a large numbers of clients. Typically, the workflow-driven process entails:
1 Selecting the campaign template
2 Targeting and identifying prospective clients using the multi-criteria
query
3 Controlling the process by which products or services are offered using
a primary workflow
4 Ensuring the appropriate follow-up is made using a secondary workflow
An analysis function provides views of the results so that the success of the campaign can be properly monitored. Either the marketing department or the relationship manager can create sales campaigns by selecting target clients and interactively sending product and service offers (funds, new issues, IPOs, structured products, new services, etc.).
Notification box and multi-channel facility >>>
The collaborative engine features a fully integrated notification box. Each user has one notification box through which real-time notification of all the alerts, work items and assigned tasks is performed. If needed, notifications can automatically be forwarded to any groupware already in use at the financial institution.
The collaborative engine also supports multi-channel delivery to each selected client through an appropriate communication channel, such as the phone, email or SMS (Email and SMS gateway must be provided by bank).
Task management >>>
The collaborative engine incorporates full Task Management functions. Task Management includes the creation of tasks for the current user and the assignment of tasks to other users. Users manage their tasks by managing the task statuses.
Various views are available to display and monitor a user’s own tasks and tasks assigned to other users. Tasks may be related to a specific Client Relationship, Client Party or Portfolio.
The workflow assigns special tasks called work items. Work items are
more formal than tasks and are usually part of a process. If a user does
not execute the work item, the proess is pending. Work items are used
for validation requests (4 eye-principle) and contribution requests.
The collaborative engine also lets users create and manage follow-up actions.
Secured agenda (planned) >>>
The collaborative engine incorporates a secured agenda with basic Appointment functionality. For confidentiality reasons, it is more appropriate to manage appointments with Clients in the Relationship Manager Workstation rather than through the standard groupware Agenda (Outlook or Notes). If needed, appointments can be synchronised with any groupware already in use at the financial institution.
Contact / Interaction Management >>>
The business component offers comprehensive Contact/Interaction Management functionality, which allows the bank to document all interactions with a client and thus improve the continuity and effectiveness of client follow-up. As a client can contact different financial experts at the bank, it is necessary to collate the details of all the events in a single application. Using Contact/Interaction Management functionality, all the information related to interactions with clients is centralised so that the bank has a single unified view.
All the contacts with clients are recorded in the system, including client visits, call reports and complaints. Not only can information be entered manually by the relationship manager, but all interactions generated by the Advice & Campaign functionality are also automatically stored in the contact/interaction database for each of the targeted clients. In addition, access to the contact/interaction information can be restricted to only those people in the organisation authorised to view details of the client.
To support the contact/interaction function, the business component also includes analysis tools that can be used to quantify the frequency of contacts and better understand client cost patterns.
Finally, the business component also features a dedicated screen for client identification. This screen combines key client data, the last five contacts and all active tasks for the selected Client Relationship or Person. This provides a quick Overview of the client and removes the risk of revealing confidential information or accepting instructions from unauthorised persons.
Document repository >>>
Collaborative workflows allow users to create and exchange content using pre-defined templates. These templates are structured documents containing data entry fields, text zones and attachment files that are used to document the rationale of any advice or information provided to Clients. All the pre-defined and completed templates are stored in the Document Repository. The attributes of the structured documents are kept in the customer knowledge base where they can be used as criteria for the multi-criteria query tool (MCQ). Content can be created freely from pre-defined templates or by reusing existing advice stored in the document repository. Content is created only once but is applied to all the selected clients. It can also be personalised for some of the targeted clients. Users can categorise documents for statistics and define views (e.g. per type, per client, etc.) for easy document retrieval.