London’s Metro Bank, which opened its first branch in 2010, wants to know its customers better. With contemporary architecture, lots of glass and facilities that are open seven days a week, it is already very accessible. And with its standing invitation for bike riders to ride right up to counters, water bowls for dogs and free coin counters, it’s a pretty friendly bank.

But now that it has grown to 48 branches and, just recently, one million customers, it wanted to know more about how customers visited physical locations, how they used mobile, online and call centres, and how to allocate resources to provide great service.

That means data and the promotion of Bruce Rioch, the bank’s business leader on its Microsoft Dynamics CRM and Power BI platform to the broader role of chief data officer, which he assumed last August.

“We had started to build a big data infrastructure to maintain a single view of the customer,” Rioch said. “As we have grown as an organisation and built more IT inside, the risk is you start to lose your single view of the customer. We built operational data store for a single view so we can understand how customers transact with us whether by phone, mobile, online or in a store.”

As chief data officer, he is also responsible for data governance, not only for understanding customer but to meet regulatory reporting requirements.

Finally, as that bank has recruited more people who want insight into the business and the customers, the demands on Power BI have increased. The bank runs on Temenos in a data centre, but for some of the other Microsoft applications, including Office 365 and Dynamics CRM, Power BI uses the Microsoft Azure cloud. The banks now have 80 dashboards for its users.

“We have grown that number significantly in part because we integrated well with our data centre.” Users can connect to Dynamics CRM, and Power BI to directly get the insights they want.

Metro recently used PowerApps to build an app to let customers pre-book appointments, or show up at a store to register for an appointment and get a text message 10 minutes before the appointment opens, so they can go shopping or take care of other business in the meantime.

“That’s all done in a table in Dynamics. A dashboard shows how much traffic comes through a store, how many customers book appointments and what they are for,” Rioch explained. “That helps us understand our flow around how many customers come into a store, helps us with resourcing and lets us understand how long customers might be waiting. The bit I really like is that the function which calculates wait time is within one minute of the actual wait time. I has really changed the way we can serve customers on a  day-to-day basis, and we built it quickly in PowerApps with Microsoft and our CRM team.

“We use Dynamics CRM for all of our customer interactions and case management. We use all of the Office 365 suite, Power BI, PowerApps, Azure functions, Azure Database and Dynamics Voice of the Customer module for our customer surveys and Dynamics Marketing for our email campaigns. ”

The idea that branches are dead is a bit of a myth. He has found through data, 55% of Metro Bank customers use its stores, and they also use its other channels including mobile, online and telephone. For data analytics, the bank relies on Azure.

“Cloud is especially useful for machine learning and internet of things, which our data centre can’t do. If we had legacy systems this would be a huge challenge, but the fact we are relatively new and chose our technology gives us a good platform to build on.

“Keeping the hybrid model and open architectures gives us the ability to spin things up quickly in the cloud, which really helps us. We definitely trust Microsoft and enjoy their partnership to help us when we need help and point us in the right direction.”

Metro Bank’s net promoter scores are in the 90s and are getting better, we added.

Looking ahead, Rioch wants to see the bank become a real insight-driven organisation.

“How do we use the data and transactional history we have to basically understand our customers better, when, where and how often they contact us so we understand out busy times?”

Written by: Tom Groenfeldt

Source: Forbes

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