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1. What would you say is the main goal of Bancaja implementing a Customer Intelligence strategy?

The objectives are aligned with those of CI, which is to have a 360 view of the customer, meaning, having the ability to aggregate all the data about a customer in a single view and also to be able to segment the customer base in such a fine-grained to implement a pure one-to-one marketing.

In the first term, Bancaja was aiming to solve the 3 main issues the organization was facing:

Ð'* unity of the group

Ð'* Cost-efficiency

Ð'* segmentation of commercial actions

Bancaja’s CEO believed that CRM could be the best way to achieve their objectives. By implementing Customer Intelligence, they’d be able to:

Ð'* Build customer loyalty based on the knowledge Bancaja has on their customers

Ð'* Design potential client criteria to elaborate marketing campaigns depending on profiles.

Ð'* Anticipate behaviour patterns of their customers

Ð'* Maintain growth in order to know which business objectives to develop in every segment.

Ð'* To avoid crossover of different campaigns as it was happening at that time.

2. What are the strengths, weaknesses and opportunities Bancaja was facing in its Customer Intelligence implementation?

Strengths:

Ð'* CRM implementation is a mandate from top management (CEO). The bank had a leader who is willing to risk crossing new boundaries in order to obtain better results

Ð'* Strong Brand.

Ð'* Strong customer orientation

Ð'* Diverse portfolio of services

Ð'* Well positioned (within Valencia’s area)

Weaknesses:

Ð'* Regional Brand. Although it is strong within a region, it does not necessarily mean that it will be easy for them to incur in new markets.

Ð'* Branch-centric mentality

Ð'* Budget & cost more inline with a small traditional institution

Ð'* Increasing competition

Ð'* Bancaja had a multitude of non-integrated business systems that proceed from the different acquired entities.

Ð'* Each system had its own unique view of the business

Ð'* Internal resistance in some departments .Branches’ employees reluctant to change into a system that only appeared to introduce complexity to their daily work. Marketing employees also reluctant as they perceived CI as the automatisation of their work, therefore a danger to the continuity of their jobs. Actually this is one of the most important disadvantages in order to successfully implement a CI solution.

Ð'* Solution’s effectiveness hasn’t yet been proved.

Ð'* Analysing the offers of the firms who sold the solution, none of them seem to have a solid product.

Opportunities:

Ð'* Analyse new possibilities for every client segment

Ð'* Discovering profitable customers and segments that might have been overlooked by the competition by using a solution that it wasn’t yet extended in the financial sector ( or even other sectors)

Ð'* High customer retention and profitability.

Ð'* Develop a proprietary model for profiling clients that used bancaja’s credit cards

Ð'* Improve effectiveness of marketing campaigns to new clients using insights from current customer information

3. What do you think about the project team?

The most important profiles needed to develop a CI project are IT people and business analysts. The project team count on both. Moreover, the project leader was the Director Commercial Planning, a position that could ease the spreading of the project within the different departments. The statistics responsible would provide the models to be developed within the solution.

Tough not being directly included in the team, there are 2 other important people supporting this development. The credit card product manager who contributed with her vision and knowledge about the product chosen for the pilot project. We think that product specialist is a high desirable profile to embark on team. The other important support was CEO’s. This is essential in order to be successful in a project of these characteristics that finds strong resistance within the organisation. Besides, his marketing’s background could be very helpful to the group.

The multidisciplinary team would complement each other.

It may have also been interesting to count, at least partially, with the collaboration of someone with legal background while privacy issues were involved at the decisions related to the data collection.

4. Analyze the advantages and disadvantages of developing a pilot project (Credit Card Market). Analyze the steps in the process.

Advantages:

Ð'* Low cost- Bancaja would save huge costs in case the project failed. If the project succeeded, Bancaja should broad the reach of the project country-wide.

Ð'* Implementation faster than a full-deployment CRM strategy. Usually CRM projects fail in its executions, and if people don't see immediate results they lose confidence in the leaders.

Ð'* If the project succeeds, skeptics would be convinced of the effectiveness of the solution and would solve the resistance problem.

Disadvantages:

Ð'* If the pilot is not implemented considering the overall legacy systems, then there could be problems when rolling out the project across the organization.

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