Hibernia Corp. says its corporate and private bankers have begun logging in to easy-to-use new software, developed partly in-house, to share records of their interactions with customers.
Largely off-the-shelf customer relationship management systems it tried in the early and middle 1990s were hard to use, said David P. Frady, a senior vice president at Hibernia National Bank.
"I couldn't force my own people to use" the previous systems, said Mr. Frady, the key corporate banker in the current project. "Nobody wanted to go look in 15 different places before going on a client call."
The New Orleans banking company's new ClientContact system is built on software from J.D. Edwards & Co. of Denver. Edwards helped customize it for Hibernia business processes in consultation with Hibernia bankers.
ClientContact has been in development for more than a year, Mr. Frady said. Pilot testing began in June, and the browser-based system went live in September.
Relationship managers are meant to use the database software as a desktop contact system, to update names and titles when contacts change jobs at client companies and to make notes on sales and phone calls, e-mails, and other interactions.
The idea is to partly to retain information when a relationship manager leaves the bank.
One problem, Mr. Frady said, is that "most banks don't know how many commercial clients they have." A single company may have hundreds of accounts, all named differently, so the bank's knowledge of that customer is fragmented.
"Most banks don't have all those accounts tied together," he said. "It's an incredibly burdensome problem. I've been working on it for two years."
ClientContact should help bank employees deal more effectively with customers' problems, Mr. Frady said. "If they go out on a sales call and they don't know what's going on, they can get blasted," he said. "I've had that happen to me personally; you reach out to shake somebody's hand and they want to take your arm off."
That is bad enough when it involves a retail customer who is frustrated about a problem with an account, but the stakes are much higher with commercial clients and high-net-worth private banking accounts.
"They are very few clients, but they represent a tremendous value to our company," Mr. Frady said. He estimated that commercial customers hold fewer than 1% of Hibernia's accounts but make up a third of its business.
ClientContact includes an e-mail feature that automatically notifies higher-level managers if lower-ranking bankers are unable to resolve customer problems. This is meant to keep the lower echelons on their toes. "They know I don't want to get a lot of those e-mails," Mr. Frady said.
The first management reports are expected this month, he said. "User acceptance, with any CRM technology, is the No. 1 challenge."
