The Challenge

In 2000 AIB's Direct Banking Group identified the need to adopt a more consistent and professional approach to sales campaign management and improve their customer interaction processes. The driving business objective was to increase AIB's direct marketing capability. As such, AIB needed to:

• Develop a more consistent and professional approach to sales
• campaign management
• Increase sales revenue
• Increase the number of customer contacts
• Increase customer loyalty
• Provide ability to up-sell and cross-sell AIB banking products
• Efficiently execute multiple, concurrent sales campaigns
• Most critically, empower sales and marketing business users to generate IT-driven campaigns without technical assistance

Direct Banking recognised that to achieve their ambitions, they needed to change their sales strategy from the current product driven sales strategy, which reacted to inbound campaigns, to a more proactive, customer-centric approach that created outbound campaigns tailored to meet customer needs and establish or strengthen valuable customer relationships.

In addition, it was apparent that the underlying and disparate IT systems and platforms could not support such a vision and that the initiative needed to focus on a selection of technology capable of supporting the Direct Banking Group current and future objectives.

The AIB Strategic Response

After two years of investigation, AIB selected Sword Ciboodle as their solution provider and system integrator and Sword Ciboodle's business process management suite was selected as the framework for the sales project.

The factors which led to the selection of Sword Ciboodle included:

• The process-centric architecture of Sword Ciboodle
• Architecture focussed on high volume solutions
• Experience in customer sales and service implementations
• Legacy system integration capability
• Model based configuration providing an exact match to AIB's sales business processes
• Support for multiple-channels
• Flexibility to adjust to the inevitable evolution of sales business practice

The Solution

Committed to delivering innovation, Sword Ciboodle has always adopted a collaborative and integrated approach when working with clients. AIB recognised the ease with which Sword Ciboodle could marry the AIB strategic acumen to the strong Sword Ciboodle execution capabilities to help drive the prosposed change program.

Sword Ciboodle was selected to implement the system in conjunction with internal AIB staff. The solution was to be created by combining Sword Ciboodle's quick start processes with custom-built business processes to provide a 100% fit to AIB's requirements. Sword Ciboodle consultants supported these efforts by conducting a series of process-driven workshops with AIB staff from every level of the organisation in order to ensure a comprehensive understanding of requirements.

From these discussions, it was agreed that the system (entitled CRM Direct) would be delivered in three controlled phases. The first would be delivered in four months; the second, six weeks later; and the third, a further six weeks on.

Regular meetings ensured that all initiatives as well as ongoing relationships with key stakeholders were continually reviewed. This strategy allowed Sword Ciboodle to gain unrivalled insight into AIB's processes and to position itself as a partner which, based on its experience in other sectors, added value to those processes, not simply a partner that implemented a solution.

Sword Ciboodle's framework allows AIB to:

• Develop and implement sales campaigns without the need for IT assistance
• Consolidate customer data from disparate systems real-time to match and model AIB's products to suit customer requirements
• Separate business logic from integration services - Sword Ciboodle's Computer Telephony Integration (CTI) templates allow business rules to directly control AIB's telephony systems (Aspect ACD and Avaya Mosaix dialer)
• Provide a single model of business rules and a single view of customer interaction data
• Reduce training costs by providing data-driven frequently asked questions (FAQs) and scripts to guide the less experienced agents through the sales process
• Leverage investment in existing legacy systems
• Support rapid iterative development
• Support incremental delivery aligned to strategic objectives and priorities

Most importantly, Sword Ciboodle has given AIB the pathway to process-driven customer sales through the application of BPM principles. The solution is business-defined, flexible and cost effective.