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In
today’s customer-centric business, a good CRM solution holds
the key to the success of any business model. ICICI realised
this in May 2000 and decided to implement Siebel across its
retail businesses to take care of these needs. In doing this,
it achieved a first, making it the largest implementation
of Siebel in India and one of the largest HTML thin-client
(browser-based) Siebel implementations in the world. Prashant
L Rao reports
As
part of its drive to increase customer satisfaction, in May
2000, ICICI decided to implement CRM across its retail business.
The move, the company believed, would give it an integrated
view of its customers across companies and delivery channels,
thus helping it fine tune its offerings to suit their specific
needs.
Subsequently, it evaluated several CRM packages and finally
zeroed in on Siebel due to the domain knowledge on retail
finance built into the product, its functional depth in Sales
Force Automation and Customer Support and Service and appropriateness
to ICICI’s business context. The R&D investments
put into the product on a continual basis and being labelled
the favourite of analysts only prompted the bank to seal the
deal in favour of Siebel faster. The company chose i-flex
to implement the project on the basis of what it said was
the ‘process maturity and extensive CRM implementation
experience’ of the latter.
i-flex started work on the project with a Business Requirement
Study in October 2000. As part of this study, it analysed
processes relating to Sales Force Automation, Incentive Compensation
and Customer Service for ICICI’s retail businesses. It
followed it up by splitting the projects into two phases and
selected seven retail businesses for initial implementation.
While the first Phase would address those requirements which
were relatively easy to implement in Siebel and for which
there was an urgent business need, the second phase would
address the remaining requirements.
 According
to BUCH, the reduction
in turnaround time will be one of the prime benefits |
Design
and customisation for Phase 1 started in December 2000. It
went live for five retail businesses on August 31st 2001,making
it the largest implementation of Siebel in India and one of
the largest HTML thin-client (browser-based) Siebel implementations
in the world. However, the going was not all that easy. The
company faced challenges in terms of meeting the business
requirements of the group companies without impacting schedules.
In addition to this, there was also the issue of ensuring
that Siebel functioned smoothly on browser-based applications
which tend to be limited in comparison to full-blown applications.
The reason for this shift from client-server to browser-based
applications was the fact that the company was moving to a
Web-based model. It therefore decided to go in for an outright
HTML thin client implementation of Siebel. The company leveraged
its 100+ person years of experience to tide over these challenges
and ensure that the implementation was a success.
In order to get user buy-in and early feedback, i-flex developed
a prototype to demonstrate how ICICI’s business processes
would be configured in Siebel. This prototype was demonstrated
in three batches to over 50 ICICI users and generated considerable
awareness about the Siebel Implementation Project within the
user community.
Users were identified as single point contacts for each retail
business. These user champions were shown screenshots of Siebel
at regular intervals during the configuration phase and their
feedback was incorporated into the package. This instilled
a sense of ownership of the Siebel System in the users. It
also created several workarounds that will be incorporated
in future versions as plain vanilla features.
Says Madhabi Puri Buch, general manager, ICICI, “We believe
that Siebel eBusiness Applications will dramatically improve
our customer service, increase
customer satisfaction
and retention and provide a strong competitive edge to the
ICICI Group.” She points out that the solution gives
ICICI some advantages over its competitors including an integrated
view of customers or prospects across companies and channels
which makes cross selling easier. Other benefits include giving
customers applying for an ICICI product, or making a service
request at a branch, the ability to inquire about application
or request status through other channels (phone etc). “Lastly,”
she says, “automatic assignment and escalation will help
ICICI improve Turn Around Time (TAT) for closing leads, opening
accounts and closing service requests.”
Says S Jairam, head-business intelligence group at ICICI and
project manager for the Siebel implementation, “A CRM
project on this scale is a highly complex task. The investment
that goes in is considerable. CRM implementations such as
these run into tens of millions of rupees just for the software
and hardware.” The principal users of Siebel will be
the custodians of ICICI’s various touchpoints. This includes
the call centre, ICICI centres and bank branches among others.
By the end of the second phase, close to 400 users are expected
to be using the package. ICICI has currently CRM enabled its
Auto Loans, Home Loans, Demat, WebTrade and ICICI Capital.
Two more business lines—ICICI Bank and credit cards—are
expected to go live shortly.
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