Know your customer

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For banks, customer information can be of crucial importance - if it is accurate and is updated regularly.

Mashreq Securities deals with retail and institutional clients, so it cannot afford to take a uniform approach to customer service. Its CRM system allows it to segment its customer base and meet their different needs more effectively.

"The key thing before you look at the CRM system and look at how it can benefit your organisation is to understand first of all the industry you are in, to understand the products and services you are offering, and most importantly to understand the requirements of the client," says Hanan Wehbi, manager, marketing and sales, Mashreq Securities.

"For instance, by segmenting the clients we have it's the best way to understand their requirements and eventually offer them the assistance that they require. It allows us to offer the systems internally for us to look at the relationship from A to Z and continue to enhance and improve the relationship. It allows us to have the records in place to have the MIS (management information system) and the analysis for future promotions or analysis, and to improve the relationship."

Foreign institutional clients in particular are likely to have high expectations and could move to another brokerage firm if their needs are not met.

"Foreign institutions come here to the region and they want one-stop service for their requirements and they don't find that," says Wehbi. "They end up dealing with more than one company because one of them gives them the level of service, another one gives them the level of product that they need, another institution gives them the level of information of research. And they don't like dealing with different people to get what they want."

To avoid this situation, Mashreq uses a mix of operational, collaborative, and personal approaches to ensure it offers appropriate kinds of service to its clients.

"When institutions come to you they want to know that there are people, processes, and procedures in place," says Wehbi. "Personal interaction is the most important thing here. An institution wants to call, they want to find someone picking up the phone, they want to call after hours, they want someone to talk to, they want an insight to the market. They're not interested in logging on online and doing their trades."

For retail clients, the reverse may hold true. "Human interaction is not as important," says Wehbi. "It might be important in the beginning while you're establishing the relationship, but after that, empowering the client to manage the relationship themselves is more important."

However, Mashreq provides supporting systems in case they are required.

"For instance, we have a call centre they can call for enquiries, even for trading, for technical support, which documents and puts in place every single call," says Wehbi. "It's recorded, it's documented what kind of complaint it is, then at the end of the month we have an MIS which tells us how many complaints we received, what type of clients, what problems did they face, then we go back, analyse and improve."

Collecting information like this also helps Mashreq to understand the investment objectives of their retail clients: to find out whether they want to make a long term investment in the market, or whether they are just in for fun or short term profit.

The firm's mix of systems and personal interaction to meet its clients needs also allows it to be flexible when clients ask for a service they do not already offer. "If we see a customer that requires a feature that can be added with minimal investment, we do it on the spot," says Wehbi. "We purchase the software system but we train our people internally: we have people who can play with the system, integrate and improve it. It happened in July when we had a couple of institutions that required a certain reporting format, so we had to go and invest in our systems to make sure that they get the reports that they need at the end of the day."

Reliable customer data is essential to the success of Selektpoints, a new loyalty scheme for payment cards that is headquartered in Dubai.

"At the core of the Selektpoints loyalty programme is its data-centric CRM, purposely built as the foundation of the programme," says Doug Sutherland, chief technical officer, Selektpoints.

Its CRM was built in partnership with Microsoft and is based on MS Dynamics 3.0 and MS SQL Server 2005. What is more, it is designed to run on the chip of a payment card.

Data on consumers, merchants, campaigns, point awards and loyalty redemptions are populated in the CRM ‘data-mart', while deeper information on Selektpoints transactions, detailing quantities, categories, dates, times, locations, prices and stock-keeping units, is kept in a datawarehouse.

"The CRM is hosted using a federated data model, with servers strategically located around the globe, including Canada, the UK and the Middle East," says Sutherland. "Consumer and merchant data is updated in real-time through web portals, while loyalty and transaction data are populated daily. Selektpoints estimates the CRM data warehouse will grow to be the largest global coalition consumer behavioural data store in the world, and second in overall consumer transactional data to Walmart."

This data could be used to target cardholders with suitable special offers, which could be distributed directly to their mobile phones by SMS.

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