Commonwealth puts seven into two

The Commonwealth Bank has used the contact management elements within Lotus Notes and Domino to cut its institutional banking sales cycle from seven days to two.

The institutional banking department, which provides transactional services to financial institutions and corporate clients of the bank, had previously managed its business relationships across multiple proprietary databases. The department did not have a central system for tracking client contacts, meaning that opportunities for cross-selling services from one product set to existing customers of another product were often missed.

"The IB staff relied a great deal on paper processes, which meant they had a lot of forms to fill out and file. They also used e-mail and word processing packages, but there were no systems in place to record and cross-reference all the vital details of their clients," said Ray Farrawell, executive manager for performance management at the institutional banking transaction services department of the Commonwealth Bank.

The Bank contracted Apastron, a four-year-old Sydney-based Lotus business partner specialising in data publishing and database-to-Web integration, to construct a customer relationship management solution. The resulting application is called the Corporate Account Management Tracking (CAMT) system.

DISPARATE DATABASES

All transactions and interactions which have been recorded in the disparate databases are stored in the system as documents. The data is also replicated to regional sites so that mobile and remotely located salespeople can also access the database.

"This means our people have more time to follow business leads with minimal time dealing with paper work," said Mr Farrawell.

"Before Lotus Notes/Domino, there was not much by way of management reports, [but] now account managers can easily see future potential."

In addition to salespeople, the CAMT system is also used by operations service teams, product managers and accounting staff. The workflow elements inherent to Notes are used to track customer contacts throughout the sales cycle.

"Data from this system is used in management reporting and for forecasting," said Mr Farrawell.

"In addition, if any sale is relevant to other sections of the bank, those sections can be notified as part of the workflow."