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Impel for the Banking/Financial
Services Sector
Maintaining good customer relationships is not a byproduct of the computer age. Bankers were already doing
business hundreds of years ago in the medieval market place. They were on a firstname basis with their
customers and were familiar with their needs. Those bankers did not need a credit agency to be able to
distinguish a trustworthy banker from a dubious bankrupt. The modern day financial market is somewhat
more complex than in medieval times. For a start the number of customers and products has grown
exponentially. Competition is also much fiercer. But like the medieval times, systematic and computerbased
CRM will be the key to future success.
The Market
The current financial services market is characterized by three distinct trends: deregulation, concentration and
globalization. According to an estimate by the University of Frankfurt, the number of mergers and acquisitions
in the European market alone grew by 23.2% annually between 1990 and 2000. This trend has been driven
by market integration, overcapacity and the easing off or disappearance of state regulation. Companies within
the banking sector are increasing their productivity and responding quickly to market changes. They are
focusing on good customer relations, who are the key to future success.
Customer freedom
There is a further trend in the financial services sector towards virtual financial markets. Customers are
enjoying greater flexibility thanks to online banking, tele banking , ebrokerage and direct insurance. The
number of online banking transactions at Comdirect, a German call center, grew from a modest 41% in 1998
to around 84% in 1999, registering a whopping annual growth of around 400%. Despite a drop in the hype
surrounding the Internet, the bank, originally intended as a callcenter, has become an Internet bank. The key
to success in such a dynamic market is customer loyalty. The basis for customer loyalty is a wellmaintained,
customerdriven database. The success of modern techniques such as telemarketing, direct marketing, cross
and upselling depends on high quality customer data. For the first time, the efficiency of sales and marketing
activities can be measured just like any other performancerelated area of a company.
Knowledge is Power
High quality customer information is crucial to targeted marketing and successful sales. The ability to gauge
demand and potential accurately is the key to generate new market opportunities and allows companies to
distinguish themselves from the competition in terms of support services.
This is absolutely critical in the financial services sector. The average customer‟s prior knowledge is scarce
and the products are complex. Also, the information required is often sensitive or personal, relating to health,
financial situation and financial planning.
Greater benefits with Impel
Impel is an integrated CRM solution from PK4 that boasts of complete CRM functionality, encompassing
market support, sales management and customer loyalty initiatives. The solution is integrated with the
appropriate functionality and database info areas for handling and automating the following typical tasks:
Contact management
Calendaring and scheduling
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Campaign management
Tele marketing
Lead tracking
Opportunity management
Account management
Sales management
Call center integration
Service management
Order processing
Analysis and reporting
Webintegration
Impel is completely browserbased and supports multitenancy. All customer information can be exchanged and
business processes triggered over the Internet. The benefits of this architecture are numerous:
Integrating all the sales channels so that all employees can access a single knowledge
base
The web can be exploited as a sales channel
Personalized customer contact and interactive customer service
An intelligent learning system, enhancing relations between customers and the sales
reps
Greater mobility as sales people are relieved of mundane tasks
Different user groups can work in the same database without influencing each other
Joint use of data
Supports multiple languages and currencies
Ease of implementation
The sales staff is saved of a considerable amount of time and effort in entering data, as a large part of the
information is entered and processed by Impel and other back office applications.
Rapid and costeffective implementation
Impel is capable of handling most standard processes in the financial services sector from the word ”go”. Due
to the presence of zeroCode, PK4‟s patentpending technology, no programming skills are required on the part
of the financial services company and the software is running within two to four weeks depending on the size
of the project. A quick ROI is therefore guaranteed. Following successful implementation, troublefree, efficient
operation of the software is backed up by a seamless global support concept.
Impel OnDemand: setting standards in the financial services sector.
Impel‟s functionality at a glance.
Sales Support and management
The division of labor among banks is changing. Structures whereby a single department advises a customer in
all areas are extremely rare and are gradually giving way to the multitiered structures where several teams,
each specializing in a particular product segment, look after one customer. Within structures like these,
computerbased sales support is the key to success. Impel takes diverse organizational structures into account
and offers a range of indispensable functions for strategic and tactical multichannels sales management.
Impel‟s sales group functionality allows you to:
Subdivide sales activities according to different business areas and product types
Assign sales groups up to two users whose roles (project manager, account manager,
sales rep etc) can be freely defined
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Automatically log the lead status of a sales group
The transparency of the sales and support structure means every employee can keep track of every customer
in minute detail, even if he may not be directly dealing with the customer. If a customer who earlier fell into
saving account category and is now interested in a product from the securities group, the new customer
representative can easily access the relevant information.
Account Management
This multirelational software stores all information about the customer and his products. Impel provides an
elaborate account management solution that helps store business particulars about the companies that banks
deal with. If the account has originated through a partner or franchisee, separate user groups are created to
store the dealer or franchisee information. An account can have more than one contact person associated
with it. Accounts can be categorized in several ways.
Contact Management
Knowing who in the company has done what, when, with which customer and with what result is often critical
to success and is always of great importance. The comprehensive contact history of a customer can benefit
both call centers during a telemarketing campaign as well as any consultant. Impel allows any authorized user
to access a customer‟s contact history at the press of a button and allows sensitive data to be kept uptodate
easily. Impel provides a centralized repository of bankwide wide customer information. It allows users to track
and analyze the nature and volume of transactions for a bank‟s customers.
Other Functions
List import. Impel provides a utility to import customer lists from different sources, including purchased lists.
360o View. Impel provides a shared, bankwide unified view of the customer, encompassing the customer‟s entire
relationship details. It includes multiple product, sales opportunities, support and service incidents and the
history of interactions of the customer with the bank. Customer Profile Manager. Personalized information about
customers is used to provide a higher level of profiling. Calendaring & Scheduling. Sales reps can set up
appointments/tasks/activities involving customers or other internal users. Reminders and notifications can be set
up at the time of fixing an appointment. Query and Reports. Preconfigured reports give first hand information
on opportunity pipelines and sales forecasts. Reports can also be built on the fly, accessing data from multiple
data sources. Advanced search and filter tools provide an easytouse interface to „slice and dice‟ customer
information as you need.
Workflow Management
Impel has inbuilt mechanisms to automatically assign leads, territories or contacts to specific sales reps,
based on the bank‟s business process. Similarly, tickets can also be assigned to service reps. Authorized bank
managers can also reverse the automatic assignment by using a manual assignment process. Impel offers
banking organizations the ability to configure the system in any way they want, to meet their exact
requirements, without any technical hassles. Be it terminologies, business processes, display mode, you name
it more than 80% of what a bank wants from Impel can be achieved with the help of configuration. Impel can
also be extensively customized to suit specific banking requirements. And this is achieved using a browser-
based, easytouse SDK that works in a programmingfree environment.
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Customer Support
Using Impel, banking organizations can provide worldclass customer service operations. Impel empowers
agents at every level by providing uptotheminute information and indepth customer and product knowledge,
which enables quick and accurate problem resolution and generates greater selling opportunities.
Ticket Management
Problem reporting & resolution. The bank‟s CSR raises a Trouble Ticket on behalf of the customer who reports
a problem pertaining to any of the bank‟s products or services. A ticket number is generated to track the
ticket. The CSR can set a priority for the problem and a target date for problem resolution. If a ticket is not
resolved within its set resolution time, it automatically gets escalated to the next level of service personnel.
Once the issue is resolved, it is treated as closed.
Ticket assignment and Tracking. Whenever a new ticket is raised the support manager assigns the tickets to a
service personnel. A Ticket History is maintained to help the CSR get a better understanding of the customer‟s
problem. If a customer has had a series of problems in the past with the same product, then the ticket
History provides the CSR sufficient information to handle the issue and the customer with a greater
sensitivity.
Contract management
A CSR can keep track of the “contract” information pertaining to every sale of banking products. For example,
the CSR can keep a track of expiry dates for credit card validity or renewal dates for credit cards, due dates
for payments and so on. The CSR can record necessary details at the time of issuing a credit card to the
customer. The information includes the contract type, contract description, start and end dates for the
contract, date of product purchase, contract value etc. Service Level Agreement details can also be associated
with the contract.
Call Center
Call center functions are available in both sales and service environments. This allows operators to make and
log call details for followup by sales or service personnel.
Marketing Automation
Impel provides a truly unified view into every aspect of the customer lifecycle. By harnessing the power of
shared information and advanced analytics, banking organizations can ensure that every marketing dollar is
spent wisely. Banks can run mass email campaigns for brand promotion or for selling their products and
services. Responses can be effectively tracked and leads generated from such campaigns are then routed to
the leads portal for further followup by the sales people.
Campaign Management
Targeted campaign management enables companies to avoid casting the net too widely and allows multistage
marketing campaigns to be planned and implemented smoothly. Impel has all the requisite features for
campaign management including:
Optimum campaign planning based on all sales and marketing information
Efficient target group definition using numerous selection criteria
Campaign management and controlling with an overview of all action items and appointments
Databasesupported implementation across all communication channels i.e. direct mail, email
merge, telemarketing, events, surveys etc.
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Document Management
Impel offers an endtoend document management solution that provides a secure, permissiondriven central,
browserbased repository for categorized storage, search/retrieval and publishing of all kinds of documents
pertaining to the banks. The online content management system makes intradepartmental information flow
more efficient. It also allows customers and other channel partners with appropriate permissions to access
bankwide data. Specific users/user groups are allowed access to folders that stores the content.
The content maintained in the folders can be of the type Simple Text, Formatted Text, Documents, Media files
(audio, video) etc. Documents can be in varying formats like PDFs, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, multimedia etc.
Email & Collaboration
Impel offers a round trip email integration using IMAP. It ships with an optional client component that syncs
contacts, calendar items and tasks between Impel and Microsoft Outlook. Changes to different items in
either environment are automatically reflected in the other.
Future additions
Imaging. Impel will provide the ability to handle tens of thousands of documents everyday, that can be
scanned and indexed, automatically.
Automated decision making. Impel will provide for complex workflowbased, automated decision making
ability to increase the number of automatic case decisions.
Automated response. Impel would provide automated, templatebased response generation mechanism that
can address a large number of customer queries every day.
Work flow Automation. Impel will offer customizable workflow management that forms the core hub of
banking CRM systems. A powerful workflow engine would also be incorporated in Impel to allow banks to
define their own business processes.
CTI integration. Impel would incorporate computer telephony integration (CTI) to allow calls to be captured
within Impel along with details of activity conducted during the call, including quotations, fulfillment, diarized
tasks being held within the case for further perusal and management information.
Origination. Impel would provide Banks the capability to streamline and automate multiple steps in the
origination process of various products of the bank like loans, credit cards etc. Key features in this module
would include multichannel support for application submission, deduplication, predefined document
checklists, templated sanction or denial letters etc.
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