1. Financial Services
-
Microsoft Dynamics CRM
Contact Center Solutions for
Banking
White Paper
Setting new standards that enable banks to service customers with
superior speed, efficiency, and satisfaction
Date: October 2008
www.microsoft.com/crm

2. Contents
Industry challenges and opportunities ........................................................................... 3
About contact centers in banking ................................................................................... 4
The contact center as a business efficiency platform ................................................... 5
Why Microsoft Dynamics CRM? ....................................................................................... 6
Case Study: Banca Transilvania ........................................................................................ 7
Business needs ................................................................................................................................................................................ 7
Choosing the right solution ..................................................................................................................................................... 8
Solution benefits ........................................................................................................................................................................... 8
Conclusion .......................................................................................................................... 9
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3. Industry challenges and opportunities
Banks and financial institutions in both developed and emerging markets are facing daunting challenges:
Market growth, heightened customer expectations, intense competition, and increasing regulatory
requirements. These pressures impact all aspects of bank operations and require a coordinated approach
to ensuring customer expectations can be met efficiently and profitably.
One specific area—contact center operations—offers both challenges and opportunities. Increasing
transaction volumes and related customer inquiries require operational performance that traditional,
disconnected legacy applications cannot support. Because their business systems and information exist in
silos, many banks simply do not have the agility they need to provide quick resolution to customer
inquiries and meet customer requirements.
Increasingly, financial institutions want to create transparent operations that will allow internal divisions to
reduce complexities and present customers with a unified service experience. The road to transparency
begins with enhancing the bank’s contact center infrastructure—rationalizing and centralizing customer
information not only in the center, but throughout the organization—to improve the customer experience
and business efficiencies through integrated customer and business processes. Key areas for achieving
efficiency and transparency include:
 Complaint management: Increasing the quality of customer care and case resolution, decreasing
resolution time for customer complaints and inquiries, integrating business processes for higher
efficiency, and providing a complete customer history for better resolution.
 Connection points: Understanding a customer’s purchase and usage history, especially in the
small (1-200 employees) and midsize (200-1000 employees) segment, enabling banks to identify
target customers for cross-selling and up-selling products.
 Marketing campaigns: Enhancing performance and tracking the success of marketing
campaigns, helping banks meet specific customer needs with the right products and services. In
addition, banks can help ensure marketing effectiveness by integrating the contact center with
campaign management via telesales/contact center agents, tracking the success of customer
campaigns, and keeping the history of a campaign’s targeted customers in the customer history.
 Sales enhancement: Improving the up-selling process by linking products with customer
databases. When the sales force and other customer-facing employees have fast access to
current, integrated information about product availability, banks can increase both revenues and
customer satisfaction.
A well-implemented contact center strategy gives banks the opportunity to build customer satisfaction,
reduce response times, optimize processes, and support partners and customers more effectively.
Managers can obtain accurate real-time case tracking and detailed reporting. Rule-driven case-resolution
can drive higher efficiency and reduce costs across all business units.
This paper provides customers and partners with examples of how Microsoft Dynamics® CRM can help
financial institutions significantly improve contact center operations. Common business scenarios,
including a case study for one of the largest retail banks in Romania, demonstrate the business value of
Microsoft Dynamics CRM.
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4. About contact centers in banking
A contact center is a multi-channel, multi-purpose organization that proactively serves a variety of people
and business areas—including customers, prospects, partners, investors, marketing, sales, and services—in
a logically consolidated and highly collaborative environment. A well-designed contact center can also
serve as the intelligence center for market research, customer experience, and business efficiency.
For example, by providing a consistent customer service experience across multiple channels, banks can
transform critical challenges into business opportunities. Equipped with the right tools, personnel in every
department can view the complete customer history. Rules-driven queuing and assigning of cases result
in more efficient, accurate handling by the agent best equipped to deal with an individual customer’s
needs.
Incoming and queue-driven outbound interaction facilitates effective load balancing and improved
utilization of contact center agents. This improves and automates service level agreement in a contact
center by tracking interactions and streamlining the escalation process.
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5. The contact center as a business efficiency platform
A bank’s ability to improve customer response times and support partners and customers more
effectively can provide major up-selling and cross-selling opportunities. With tagged questions, stored
answers, and access to complete customer histories and product portfolios, agents can personalize
individual customer interactions.
For example, contact center support staff can resolve service issues efficiently, communicate resolutions in
real-time, and escalate incidents with a single click. Well-orchestrated marketing campaigns enable banks
to instantly score and qualify inbound and outbound leads based on a holistic customer view. Staff can
route leads, follow up on inside sales processes, or efficiently send leads to partners via e-mail.
In addition, automatic workflows and process automation make it easier to drive and monitor tasks, e-
mails, and other user-defined activities.
As growing numbers of banking customers take advantage of e-mail applications for issues that are not
time-critical, banks can find new ways to reduce costs and improve customer experience. For example,
many banks now prioritize customer responses according to the way the customer contacts the bank.
Because voice calls are usually more urgent than e-mails, agents give calls priority; callbacks can provide
faster resolution for the client. For less urgent matters, e-mail is the bank’s preferred communication
channel. E-mail can help the center relieve workload during peak business hours, eliminating or at least
reducing the need to employ new agents for peak hours.
Integrating e-mail into contact center operations offers additional benefits, including:
 Improved resource allocation: Banks can use existing agents more effectively for inbound and
outbound contact, especially during off-peak periods.
 Higher quality resolution for clients via e-mail: Customers can be presented with a professional and
competent response by distributing e-mails based on the case-priority, subject and agents knowledge
with right skills.
 High availability: All e-mails will be answered regardless of priority and subject; equally important,
every e-mail is assigned to an agent who can actually resolve the client’s issue.
 Preferential handling of ―VIP‖ customers: Regardless the contact channel, these customers can receive
priority service.
 Reduced fluctuation: By pre-qualifying issues and assigning cases based on agent skills, banks not
only can increase efficiency, but also improve job satisfaction and agent retention.
The e-mail service can be used by both internal and external customers. External customers can send a
direct e-mail message using one of the addresses published by the bank or by a specific campaign, or
they can use the e-mail form available on the bank’s Web site. As noted above, e-mails from VIP
customers can be prioritized. Depending on the e-mail category and routing strategy, an automatic
response can be sent to the client while the e-mail is delivered and queued to the first available qualified
agent.
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6. A well-designed contact center also defines the Service Level Agreement (SLA) - the time it takes to
resolve incidents, problems, and inquiries, and to respond to e-mails. This drives changes to optimize cost,
performance, capacity, and availability in the delivery of services every day.
To improve both corporate identity and the customer experience, e-mail response templates can include
predefined text elements for customer e-mails, helping them responding quickly and professionally to
client issues.
Why Microsoft Dynamics CRM?
The banking community is aware that a customer contact center is more than a call center for case
management or a unilateral approach to serving customers. A contact center is a logical business unit that
uses integrated customer information to improve marketing, sales, and services in a collaborative manner.
Seen in this light, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) becomes the contact center’s foundation.
Equipped with the right CRM solution, financial institutions can use comprehensive customer information
to increase business performance and improve the customer experience across all channels and all
business units.
The Microsoft Dynamics CRM platform is a full suite of CRM applications that can help financial
institutions discover new business opportunities and streamline sales, marketing, and service. Microsoft
Dynamics CRM provides a path for scalability, integration, and business value across all departments—by
providing a platform for a contact center in the bank, it can help turn the contact center into a strategic
asset rather than a cost center. Equally important, banks can support closed-loop marketing, sales, and
services within one system. Microsoft Dynamics CRM:
 Helps financial institutions create the customer service intelligence they need to enhance the customer
experience and uncover new business opportunities at all customer contact points.
 Allows financial institutions to differentiate themselves through new standards in contact center
management.
 Provides contact center agents with an intuitive interface that works as a native extension of
Microsoft® Office Outlook®.
 Incorporates detailed insight into customer information, case histories, and integration with back-
office systems and desktop applications, including the Microsoft Office system.
 Provides management and reporting functions to automate and simplify routing, tracking and
analysis for customer service operations.
 Aids business development with trend analysis that identifies product and service issues, enabling fast
correction and proactive responses to market changes.
 Can be integrated fully with legacy applications, the Internet, and corporate intranets through the use
of Web Services.
 Integrates with most existing telephony systems through CTI/IVR connectors that automate and
enable customer care center solutions.
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7. Case Study: Banca Transilvania
Using Microsoft Dynamics CRM as a contact center platform that integrates with multiple systems, Banca
Transilvania achieved a 30 percent increase in telesales productivity.
Banca Transilvania, a member of Financial Group Banca Transilvania, is a Romanian bank with 500
branches and 6,000 employees. With more than one million customers, Banca Transilvania ranks among
the top five Romanian banks, and in 1997 it became the first Romanian financial institution to be listed on
the Bucharest Stock Exchange.
Four business divisions comprise Banca Transilvania: Retail banking, small and midsized enterprises,
medical, and corporate. As part of the retail division, the contact center is responsible for key customer-
facing operations. It routes customer calls and e-mail messages through a third-party center according to
customer priority and operator experience. The contact center provides information and support for all
products—including accounts, cards, and Internet banking—and it supports retail partners who have
point-of sale (POS) systems installed in retail locations. The center also implements marketing, telesales,
and collections campaigns. Currently, the center has 34 operators available 24 hours a day, and handles
an average of 30,000–35,000 calls per month.
Business needs
The growth of Banca Transilvania, along with growing competition in the local market, challenged the
bank to improve customer satisfaction and retention. Specifically:
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8.  The contact center faced increasing volumes of multi-channel interactions with customers.
 Marketing, sales, and customer care departments needed to optimize their internal processes and
services so they could retain more clients.
 The marketing department wanted to use contact center tools to deploy marketing campaigns and
measure their results.
 Internet banking services planned to automate subscriptions to avoid the long time-to-market delay
caused by the large number of manual operations.
 Finally, the customer care department needed a repeatable routine for consistently managing
complaints.
The Banca Transilvania contact center operated under constraints that made it difficult to meet these
business needs. The contact center did not permit the collection and/or tracking of customers’
information. Nor did it permit the creation of customer profiles, which can help analyze how customers
buy products and use bank services. Creating profiles was especially critical for small and midsized
business clients, who are targets for up-sells.
Before implementing Microsoft Dynamics CRM, Banca Transilvania did not have a system for keeping
client histories. The existing application delivered information and reports on calls only, not clients.
Choosing the right solution
To fuel business excellence and provide a superior customer experience, the bank management decided
to integrate a CRM solution into its existing third-party contact center. After evaluating several solutions, a
project management team chose Microsoft Dynamics CRM. The team’s choice was based on several
advantages. The bank’s third-party center offered built-in integration connectors for Microsoft Dynamics
CRM, eliminating integration costs. The center and other business units would share a user interface that
looked and worked like Office Outlook, reducing training costs and increasing adoption and employee
satisfaction. Built-in marketing and sales force automation would address the business needs of other
divisions. Additional reasons for choosing Microsoft Dynamics CRM included rapid time to market and
lower total cost of ownership (TCO).
Solution benefits
By implementing an integrated contact center solution, Banca Transilvania has realized the following
benefits:
 Customer data is generated, tracked, and reported at each level of the contact management
process.
 Using customer contact history and inquiries, the system creates and updates a searchable
database of FAQs that can be queried by bank agents. The agent can easily attach database
articles to responses and case resolutions for higher efficiency.
 The contact history is rolled up, reported, and summarized in the customer history record, helping
ensure a comprehensive, accurate customer view. The application manages contact information
and history, so that the agent receives the right information for each customer contact.
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9.  New accounts that are set up in the legacy system are mapped to the CRM application. Agents
have immediate access to new information, enabling them to stay current with new business.
 Daily activities, including customer inquiries and campaign activities, are automatically delivered
to the agent’s desktop and work queue to facilitate ease of processing.
 Open and neglected issues are escalated automatically based on the SLA and other priorities.
These issues can be identified, reported to management, routed, and tracked with status updates
through final resolution.
 Work rules are used to manage work flow for business processes, driving fast, accurate resolution
of inquiries and issues.
 Microsoft SQL Server® Reporting Services simplify and streamline report writing and viewing.
 Queues can be set quickly to handle new business requirements—without rolling out a new
configuration of the application—fueling employee productivity and satisfaction.
Conclusion
Banks recognize the need to identify, attract, and retain profitable clients, but often lack a full or holistic
view of their customers. In addition, client demand for flexible, customized services and products that can
be accessed through multiple channels has leveled the competitive playing field. Banks are looking for
solutions that will empower contact center personnel to provide smarter, faster resolution, provide a
complete customer view that fuels greater customer intimacy, and support the ability to resolve inquires,
up-sell, and cross-sell a full range of financial products and services.
Though decision makers understand the value of this comprehensive approach, they are hesitant to take
the plunge. They are concerned about high costs, user adoption, and the risks associated with time spent
deploying a CRM system that addresses these needs.
There is a solution. Microsoft Dynamics CRM can fit the way contact center agents work, fit the way banks
work, fit existing technology, and fit any budget. Microsoft Dynamics CRM offers tools that work as a
natural extension of the Microsoft Office system, helping banks increase agent productivity, enhance
business insight, improve operational efficiencies and achieve cost containment.
Through Web Services and native service oriented architecture (SOA), Microsoft Dynamics CRM can
aggregate data from disparate sources to provide a fully integrated, 360° customer view that includes
client profiles and histories, portfolio accounts, relationships, households, and support records—all from a
central location and within a familiar user interface. Your staff can focus on immediate and long-term
goals for clients through improved internal collaboration and business process management, critical
business alerts, and shorter sales cycles.
Microsoft Dynamics CRM also offers a cost-effective, flexible CRM solution that delivers measurable return
on investment (ROI) by helping drive sales and customer loyalty without high ongoing costs. Because
Microsoft Dynamics CRM is built on the Microsoft platform and utilizes SOA technology, most
organizations can implement and integrate the solution into existing systems efficiently and cost-
effectively.
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10. The information contained in this document represents the current view of Microsoft Corporation on the issues
discussed as of the date of publication. Because Microsoft must respond to changing market conditions, this document
should not be interpreted to be a commitment on the part of Microsoft, and Microsoft cannot guarantee the accuracy of
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