Deluxe F.S. & Commerce Bank Expands CRM for Customers

Officials from Deluxe Financial Services and Commerce Bank, a regional bank holding company with approximately 360 locations in Missouri, Illinois, Kansas and Oklahoma, say they will deploy "anti-fraud and CRM tools."

Deluxe will provide its customers with products such as advanced fraud recovery assistance and protection through Deluxe ID TheftBlock 2.0. This offers two levels of service -- a fraud recovery and a fraud recovery plus detection option. "According to the Federal Trade Commission, identity theft strikes seven to 10 million new victims each year," said Charles Kim, Executive Vice President, Commerce Bank.

In addition, Commerce Bank will further their efforts to strengthen customer relationships with DeluxeCalling, an outbound calling service designed to reach new indirect loan customers.

There's been a recent emphasis on CRM for community banking institutions, but as industry observer Edmund Tribue has written, by focusing too much on the technological aspect of CRM, "banks have largely ignored their goal of improving their customers' experience."

For the most part, Tribue says, "banks have focused their technology-related CRM efforts on systems that provide internal measurements, such as the number of customer contacts and average calls per agent hour. While these measurements might be important from an efficiency standpoint, they don't provide focused metrics pertaining to customer experiences and perceptions."

In other words, he correctly observes, "The call center agent who handles 75 calls per hour might be fast, but if most of those customers need a call back, he isn't as efficient as another agent who handles half as many calls but manages to resolve every issue in one call."

David Sims is a contributing editor for TMC (News - Alert) Net.  For more articles please visit David Sims' columnist page.

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