The financial sector is renowned for its use of cutting-edge IT technology. Partly this is due to the fierce competition in the sector, but no doubt it is also because money is an information commodity. The percentage of money that ever appears as coins or notes is insignificant Ã, the important amounts are all just bits and bytes. You could even argue that finance has been an information-age business since gold coins were replaced with promises scribbled on scraps of paper.
It's not just in the world of traders, brokers, pork bellies and funny hand-signals where the quality of IT makes a difference. The high street banks have invested in data warehouses and customer relationship management (CRM) systems to back up their branches and their phone and online banking systems.
My own bank, for example, is a member of the CRM Forum. According to its own marketing department, it has a 'central customer data warehouse' that enables everything 'from cross-selling to customer retention and acquisition'.
This is all very interesting because in September I enquired about a mortgage. The bank's in-house adviser carefully asked me about my situation, calculated how much I could borrow, and promised to call me 'in a week or two' to see how things were going.
Well, it took more than a couple of weeks to find a property so I wasn't bothered that the call never materialised. But by early December I was ready to buy. The adviser greeted me like a new friend, made no mention of not calling me, asked many of the same questions all over again, and finally set out the terms of the mortgage. 'If you can find a better deal, we'll give you a tenner,' he grinned.
It must have been a false grin because I soon discovered that the offer was rubbish. An independent adviser found several reputable lenders with better deals, and I settled for one that will save me Ã,£90 a month over five years Ã, or Ã,£5,400. A bit more than a tenner, then. A month later my bank called to ask if I wanted its mortgage. I told the caller I'd decided to go elsewhere. 'Oh, OK then,' she said. 'Do you want me to return the paperwork or destroy it?'
So, from my perspective, the bank's investment in CRM might just as well have been spent on custard pies. Is it just me, or should the bank have asked (a) which lender I'd decided to borrow from; (b) what the deal was; and (c) if it was too late to make a better offer?
But what really troubles me about this episode is the Ã,£10. This was offered as an inducement to take on the largest financial commitment I'm ever likely to make. Is this organisation really, genuinely serious about serving me properly? Is it remotely serious about making money from me? Or is it just stupid, lazy and complacent?
It's an old story, but the lesson here is that all the CRM and data warehousing in the world won't help if you don't change the corporate culture.
Cultural change is slow and usually painful. The only way to speed it up is to recognise that people, like my bank, are generally lazy. Only those systems that make an employee's working life simpler and more straightforward will be willingly used and will actually make a difference. In short, when you think about customer relationships, don't forget about employee relationships.
Based on the evidence above, I can only conclude that my bank's CRM systems are about as simple and pleasant to use as a home enema kit.
