When Westpac New Zealand wanted to build more valuable relationships with its banking customers, it knew that it would have to upgrade its aging on-premises CRM environment. The bank decided to migrate to cloud-based Microsoft Dynamics 365 to streamline and automate its sales and business processes. With a unified view of its customer data, Westpac New Zealand can forge new ways to do business, make more meaningful connections with customers, and compete effectively in its market.
As we use Microsoft Dynamics 365 to centralize data, we will better understand which banking and financial services each customer needs to succeed—and what we should be delivering to them.
David Quinn: Head of CRM Development
Westpac New Zealand
A customer-centric banking strategy
New Zealand is famously home to more sheep than people and to breathtaking, empty vistas straight from Lord of the Rings. But room to graze and glacier-bound peaks to the horizon notwithstanding, there are almost 5 million people in New Zealand, more than half living in just a few large urban areas. Auckland alone has 1.5 million residents, and the country’s per capita GDP is about the same as in France, Germany, or Canada.
New Zealanders live in the same twenty-first century as the rest of us, and they need banking, credit, wealth management, and other financial services. One of the country’s largest banks, with almost 200 branches and 1.3 million customers nationwide, Auckland-based Westpac New Zealand is using Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Customer Service and Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Sales to transform how it does business with its retail and commercial banking customers.
Heavily regulated businesses like banks can find it hard to differentiate on products and services, so Westpac set out to compete by building more valuable customer relationships. But with its dated and fragmented customer relationship management (CRM) tools, the bank struggled with manual processes, duplicated effort, and missed opportunities for more productive customer engagements.
“We decided to adopt a customer-centric business strategy,” says Julian Downs, Head of Architecture Services at Westpac New Zealand. “So, we chose Dynamics 365 to streamline, replace, and automate our sales, marketing, and customer service processes.”
A more consistent approach
Historically, when new customers joined Westpac, the bank would gather their data and prepare any necessary assessments. But when customers moved across channels within the bank, from online or retail banking or credit services to wealth management, investment, or commercial banking, they were difficult to track. Existing customers sometimes went through duplicate processes, and the bank missed opportunities to provide the best service for its customers.
“With Dynamics 365, we can follow a more consistent approach to customer onboarding, follow-up, and personalization—without having to enter data multiple times into multiple systems,” says David Quinn, Head of CRM Development at Westpac New Zealand.
A unified view
After nine months of planning and preparation, Westpac migrated from its on-premises CRM environment to Dynamics 365, hosted in Microsoft Azure. In March 2018, Dynamics 365 went live for the commercial banking division and will be available throughout the bank by 2019.
Westpac uses Dynamics 365 to develop business management solutions integrated across workflows such as procurement, commercial lending, and risk management, with plans to utilize it across retail banking, online banking, contact centers, and financial planning. The Westpac Integrated Customer Environment will use Dynamics 365 to help make sales processes more effective and risk assessments more accurate in commercial and agribusiness. The Your Story service will use Dynamics 365 to create a unified view of retail customers, their financial journey, and their banking needs—now and in the future.
“We use Dynamics 365 to capture and unify customer data such as income, expenses, and behavior, so we can understand their goals and needs,” says Downs. “Then we can build meaningful customer relationships that create real value.”
New ways to operate
By unifying its relationship and opportunity management with Dynamics 365, Westpac can reduce operational cost and effort, create better customer experiences, and generate new revenue opportunities. It can achieve more in less time and streamline time to value as it delivers new business tools, updates, and upgrades.
According to Downs and Quinn, Westpac employees used to spend up to 80 percent of their time on data entry and managing systems, but with Dynamics 365, they can now spend that time building relationships with customers. “The ability to sync customer data in real time has changed what our relationship managers can achieve,” says Downs. “From our front-line customer service staff to the back office, we’re using Dynamics 365 to change the way we operate.”
More meaningful customer connections
With real-time customer data at their fingertips all the time, Westpac employees can make meaningful connections faster and serve customers better. They can quickly give answers and information to customers and help them complete transactions in minutes instead of days, and they can spend more time understanding customer goals and needs.
“As we use Microsoft Dynamics 365 to centralize data, we will better understand which banking and financial services each customer needs to succeed—and what we should be delivering to them,” says Quinn.
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We decided to adopt a customer-centric business strategy. So, we chose Dynamics 365 to streamline, replace, and automate our sales, marketing, and customer service processes.