Collaborative Customer Relationship Management in Financial Services Alliances

The integration of the financial services industry and many financial services companies' focus on core competencies have led to the emergence of financial services alliances. These alliances face a variety of challenges regarding an integrated approach to Customer Relationship Management (CRM) by the partner companies. In this paper we describe the challenges derived from an analysis of five financial services companies that formed different financial services alliances. The main inhibitors of a consistent approach towards customers are found in business processes and information systems that are not sufficiently integrated. Some partner companies' customer-oriented business processes only have an incomplete knowledge of their customers, which is especially conspicuous in after-sales service management and complaint management processes. The limitations of the information systems infrastructure are the source of most challenges in collaborative CRM processes. The partial standardization of CRM systems in financial services alliances inhibits the exploitation of economies of scale as well as the integration of systems. Consequently, obtaining a comprehensive view of a customer relationship becomes complicated if the integration of systems containing knowledge of customers, such as operational and analytical CRM systems as well as transaction systems, is limited. An increased integration of these systems has the potential not only to improve the quality of customer consultancy, but also to foster the exploitation of a customer's potential. To illustrate how a state-of-the art IT infrastructure for CRM can be designed in financial services alliances, we present a case study of a leading financial services alliance in Germany.