IBM FileNet Launches Customer Information Management

Enterprise Content Management and Business Process Management based platform achieves single customer view, improves productivity and reduces administration costs

It also automates customer centric business processes, such as customer on-boarding or complaint handling, to improve productivity and reduce administration costs.

Customer Information Management is based on the IBM FileNet P8 platform for Enterprise Content Management (ECM) and Business Process Management (BPM), which has solved many customer information centric challenges for organisations including Alliance & Leicester, Britannia Building Society, BSkyB and PZU. Customer Information Management addresses the following key corporate challenges:

• Gaining single customer view across products, departments and accounts
• Monitoring progress against Service Level Agreements (SLAs)
• Consumer empowerment through improved information access
• Reducing identity theft by protecting customer data
• Automating time consuming customer facing processes
• Establishing an effective audit trail for customer complaint handling
• Providing a basis for improved cross selling to customers

IBM FileNet's platform has already helped UK organisations to improve customer experience. For Alliance & Leicester, deploying IBM FileNet P8 has led to fewer resources being needed to deal with customer queries, advisors having a complete set of customer information at their fingertips and customer enquiries being resolved more quickly.

Julie Hughes, Programme Manager at Alliance & Leicester Commercial Bank, says, "Our customer service processes involved lots of hand-offs from front line advisers to back office staff so they were very resource-intensive. If the person in the front office dealing with the customer couldn't answer a query, it would be passed on to someone else to locate the relevant documentation, and then sometimes passed on again, this time to a specialist. The IBM FileNet solution has certainly been very successful in supporting back office efficiency, but we are even more impressed by its ability to support improved customer service."

At Britannia Building Society, IBM FileNet is used to ensure that all hard copy customer documentation is available in digital format quickly to improve the handing of customer enquiries. David Lymer, Strategy Manager, Britannia, says, "When a customer letter arrives in the post room, it is immediately scanned and then routed electronically as a work item to someone with the appropriate skills and knowledge to respond. This is obviously much more efficient than circulating paper documents and makes it easier for us to define, monitor and improve service levels. If a customer calls up with a query, the relevant information is always available to support a fast, effective response. Because everything is integrated, any relevant document can be found within seconds."

Tom Pringle, Senior Analyst at Datamonitor, says, "Customer information management is often the missing piece of the customer puzzle facing organisations today. The increasing use of multi-channel communications has made the task of understanding customers and managing their entire experience with an organisation much more complicated. Content and process management solutions such as IBM FileNet's can help unlock silos of customer information, automate customer centric processes and empower those people engaging with customers."