Focus on Icici Bank’s Initiatives

The use of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) in banking has gained importance with the aggressive strategies for customer acquisition and retention being employed by banks in today’s competitive milieu. This has resulted in the adoption of various CRM initiatives by these banks to enable them to achieve their objectives.

The steps that banks follow in implementing Customer Relationship Management (CRM) are: Identifying CRM initiatives with reference to the objectives to be attained (such as increased number of customers, enhanced per-customer profitability, etc.), Setting measurable targets for each initiative in terms of growth in profits, number of customers, etc. and Evaluating and choosing the appropriate Customer Relationship Management (CRM) package that will help the company achieve its CRM goals (a comparison of pay-offs against investments could be carried out during the evaluation exercise).

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) has been deployed in retail banking. The challenges in managing customer relations in retail banking are due to the multiple products being offered and the diverse channels being used for the distribution of the products. Customer expectation from banks can be summed up as: “Any time anywhere service, personalized offers, and lower payouts”. Aggressive marketing and promotions on the part of the banks have resulted in most customers happily switching loyalties to enjoy better privileges, thereby making the task of retaining them more difficult for the banks. The use of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) in banking has been essentially done for the following purposes: Targeting customers: It is necessary for banks to identify potential customers for approaching them with suitable offers. The transactional data that is generated through customer interactions and also by taking into account the profile of the customer (such as the lifecycle stage, economic background, family commitments, etc.) needs to be collated into one database to facilitate its proper analysis. For example, a customer interacts with the banks for savings accounts, credit cards, home loans, car loans, demand accounts, etc. the data generated through all these services need to be integrated to enable effective targeting. After the integration is done, a profitability analysis of the customer needs to be undertaken to acquire an understanding of the profit-worthiness of the customer before targeting him with new offers.

Sales reference material: A consolidated information database on all products, pricing, competitor information, sales presentations, proposal templates, and marketing collateral should be accessible to all the people concerned. These prove to be very helpful in Sales Force Automation (SFA) wherein the salesperson gets instantaneous access to all relevant material as and when it is required (especially when he/she is in a meeting with a client.) Consistent interface with customers: The communication to customers from various departments like sales, finance, customer support, etc.