Exchange Applications And Fleet Financial Group Win Data Warehouse Institute's 'Best Customer Relationship Management Solution' Award
Exchange Applications, Inc. and its client Fleet Financial Group have won the "Best Customer Relationship Management Solution" award from The Data Warehouse Institute (DWI), the Institute announced recently. The trophy marks the third consecutive year that Boston-based Exchange Applications has won a DWI award. Exchange Applications teamed with client Federal Express in 1997 and with INVESCO Funds in 1998. Exchange Applications supplies software and services that help companies optimize the value of their customer relationships.
Fleet Financial Group, based in Boston, is a $100 billion diversified financial services company. As the largest bank in the Northeast outside of New York City, Fleet services 10 million retail customers, 400,000 small businesses and an additional seven million customers recently acquired through acquisition.
A few years ago, Fleet's marketing efforts remained mired in a product orientation that focused more on campaign response rates and balances generated than on customer profitability and customer potential. Today, Fleet has put in place an ambitious Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solution that continuously plans, executes, assesses and improves targeted marketing campaigns within a "closed-loop" cycle.
Astoundingly, the bank expects the bulk of bottom-line benefits to derive not from improved cross-selling, up-selling and customer retention, but from strategic changes to its business. "We now have an iterative process in which we can continually experiment and learn how to redesign our products and services to make them more appealing and profitable," said Randall B. Grossman, senior vice president and director of Customer Data Management & Analysis.
To contrast its current knowledge and capabilities, Grossman noted that Fleet at one time had been unaware that nearly half its customers were unprofitable, and of those, 20 percent were "very unprofitable." Retention campaigns were successful at retaining the wrong customers. Today, Fleet focuses on smart marketing-dollar allocation and continuous evaluation and improvement of campaign effectiveness.
Exchange Applications has helped Fleet with its CRM initiative in three essential areas: marketing process definition, customer data warehouse implementation and delivery of the award-winning VALEX campaign management software. Fleet will present its CRM case study at the Data Warehouse Institute Leadership Conference in Orlando, November 14-19, 1999.
Andrew Frawley, Exchange Applications' president and CEO noted that the award, won jointly by Exchange Applications and Fleet, "demonstrates the value that companies can obtain today from commercially available database-marketing and campaign-management software." Frawley says companies of varying size and industry can apply virtually the same system utilized by Fleet to:
Exchange Applications helps businesses optimize the value of customer relationships across channels and product lines. Its VALEX software and consulting services help businesses identify customer segments offering high profit potential, and then maximize the value of those segments through highly targeted and coordinated direct marketing campaigns. Exchange Applications provides marketers with the technology to plan, build, execute, analyze and refine marketing campaigns that produce measurable return on investment. Through VALEX, a company automates and accelerates its marketing process to improve customer acquisition, expansion and retention. Exchange Applications is based in Boston, with offices in Denver, London and Sydney. Visit Exchange Applications on the Web at http://www.exapps.com.
Today, Fleet operates 1,200 branch outlets in eight states, 2,400 ATM machines, and 85,000 active on-line banking customers. It must field 80 million telephone calls annually. The bank recently announced its merger with cross-town rival BankBoston, a combination that will create the eighth largest bank in the United States.