Maybank Singapore Boosts Its Customer Sales and Service Standards With Microsoft Technology

Microsoft Dynamics CRM helps Maybank Singapore drive business excellence through a stronger connected customer experience and improved operational efficiency.

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Microsoft Corp.

Apr 19, 2010, 11:34 ET

SINGAPORE, April 19 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Microsoft Corp. today announced at Asian Banker Summit 2010 that the Singapore operations of Maybank, the largest financial services group in Malaysia, has been able to meet major banking customer challenges through key business benefits from the implementation of Microsoft Dynamics CRM.

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The key objective of Maybank Singapore's customer relationship management (CRM) system implementation was to establish a single view of customer information and automate workflow processes to improve service fulfillment, sales/campaign operations and incident management across the bank.

The implementation of a CRM system in Maybank Singapore is a key capability to help drive business excellence by improving key processes and service offerings that enhance the customer experience and operational efficiency. The most distinguishing feature of this Microsoft Dynamics CRM implementation is its collaboration capability that enabled the bank to effectively harness the operational synergy between various units to improve sales and service standards.

"Equipping our front-line and middle-office users with accurate customer insights and a holistic view of the customer's relationships with the bank will not only bring about better targeted-selling and relationship-building but also help reduce possible operational risks," said Lim Kuo Siong, Head of IT & eBusiness, Maybank Singapore. "The implementation of our Microsoft Dynamics CRM solution has helped us to meet our service excellence goals. The project has finally allowed us to automate many sales and service fulfillment activities between our front-end service channel and our middle-office support units, thereby taking our operational efficiencies to higher levels and reducing service turnaround time in meeting our customer requests, customer feedback and sales fulfillment objectives."

The implementation of Microsoft Dynamics CRM helped Maybank Singapore address a number of front-end sales and service process challenges. These challenges included the manual distribution and tracking of sales leads and marketing lists assigned to front-end sales personnel and an inconsistent view of customers as front-liners and middle-office users had access to different systems for customer information. The bank also needed the visibility for the escalation and tracking of customer service requests, which could cause long turnaround times for inter-department investigation and resolutions relating to user inquiries or feedback.

With the implementation of its C-Portal for Microsoft Dynamics CRM, Maybank Singapore was able to address these challenges. Microsoft Dynamics CRM helped the bank achieve its single-customer view objective by establishing real-time as well as synchronized batch-integration of critical customer and account data from its bank-wide customer information file and core-banking systems. The bank also was able to improve collaboration and reduce turnaround time between front- and middle-office units for service fulfillment through the implementation of automated service-request workflows and escalation capabilities. In addition, improved incident management capabilities of the bank through efficient and visible incident reporting, escalation and follow-up reduced the turnaround time for investigation and resolution of reported incidents.

"By connecting systems that drive new operational efficiencies, Microsoft Dynamics CRM helped Maybank Singapore to increase transparency and accelerate innovation enterprise-wide," said Joe Pagano, managing director of Banking and Capital Markets for the Worldwide Financial Services Industry Group at Microsoft. "Maybank Singapore's CRM success demonstrates the power of the connected customer experience in banking. The robustness and flexibility of Microsoft Dynamics CRM helps Maybank Singapore in its pursuit of customer service excellence year after year."

Microsoft Dynamics CRM also enabled efficient collaboration between the bank's marketing and sales units through automated workflows and improved pipeline visibility for tracking sales and service fulfillment to boost sales and meet the high level of customer expectations.

Maybank Singapore's decision to automate its incident and compliment management processes in Microsoft Dynamics CRM has brought about wide-ranging benefits to the bank beyond dollars and cents. Reducing turnaround times for complaint resolution and enabling quick staff recognition are two intangible benefits that contributed to the increase in customer satisfaction levels and improved staff morale since the system's implementation.

"This is a new era where corporations are reassessing their institutional relationships and transferring accounts is easier than ever before," said Steven Murphy, research director, Wholesale Banking, TowerGroup. "Financial service institutions must be cognizant of their own need to make clients' lives easier. Service is a key differentiator and clients expect access to all client account relationships at any time across multiple channels."

"The industry knows and has experienced that complex integration projects like CRM not only require the right people, but the right tools to make it a success," said Lim. "Microsoft Dynamics CRM and its robust .NET platform enabled us to simplify the huge and complex integration works across various host systems from IBM AS/400-, Windows- and Unix-based platforms and meet the goal of achieving 'single customer view' in the shortest time possible."

The strong integration features and technical interoperability of the Microsoft Dynamics CRM solution and Windows operating platform allowed Maybank Singapore to reuse existing components and complete the development of all back-end integrations across multiple core-banking systems, EAI (message broker), Microsoft Exchange Simple Mail Transfer Protocol, Short Message Service gateway and the Active Directory with ease. This allowed the project team to focus on the front-end customization works and successfully complete the project on time and within budget.

About Microsoft in Financial Services

Microsoft's Financial Services Group provides software that helps financial firms transform the customer, employee and operations experience so they can maximize opportunities for increased market share and profitability. Microsoft software helps empower people and IT staff within financial firms — and across key focus areas such as advisor platforms, channel renewal, insurance value chain, enterprise risk management and compliance, and payments. Through a combination of Microsoft- and partner-provided solutions, customers enable their employees to turn data into insight, transform ideas into action and turn change into opportunity. More information about Microsoft's Financial Services Group can be found at http://www.microsoft.com/financialservices.

Founded in 1975, Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) is the worldwide leader in software, services and solutions that help people and businesses realize their full potential.

SOURCE Microsoft Corp.