Coping with Channel Strain

Banks get on board with business-process, standards-based technology, and old-fashioned teamwork The need for smart thinking about the internet prompted Detroit-based Comerica to rethink its organizational chart--at least temporarily. This was part of a plan to web-enable the $50 billion-assets institution. "About a year and a half ago, we developed a cross-functional planning team comprised of senior managers from 15 different lines of business and other Internet experts working throughout the bank," explains Richard Lyons, senior vice-president at Comerica's Internet Payment Systems and System Strategy Group. Channel management at Comerica and elsewhere once had exclusively to do with maintaining branches, ATMs, and call centers. But it became clear that interfacing with customers would require a re-engineering of the organization in ways not imagined ten years earlier. To get the mammoth task underway, prospective web initiatives were shared by this horizontal grouping of executives. "Together We met several days a Week over a four-month period to outline projects and ways to simplify bank operations and make use of web technology," says Lyons. He notes that in the time since, he's read of a few other top banks deploying similar cross-channel initiatives to gain line-of-business insight, though when Comerica took the approach it wasn't common practice. Lyons recounts that the bank's chairman and CEO, Eugene Miller, asked that such a group be put together in order for the bank to get serious about the internet and not relegate it to a spinoff project. The bank wanted views informed by the various pockets of expertise throughout the organization. This was done to share ideas about best practice and avoid duplication of efforts. Eventually the bank identified 35 projects in five key areas, including customer initiatives; utilities such as content repurposing and workflow; and infrastructure like firewalls, routers, and digital certificates. The bank also wants to retool its customer relationship management effort, making use of web-based technology and simplified workflows. In the most recent phase of the project, the team is identifying best practices for producing a unified, web-based delivery of marketing materials and items such as checks to clients. The idea is to let all channels share similar processes and, at the end of the day, create common looking forms and graphical user interfaces for better brand identity. Comerica's approach illustrates one key aspect of the channel management problem--that is, shepherding people toward a common agenda as part of business process management. But there are other issues. Exploding channels "Channel strain" is a term you'll sometimes hear at industry conferences. It refers to the stress of managing multiple customer touch points and product distribution methods--and of smartly linking line-of-business technology previously disconnected. Not that the concept is new. Like regulators and other requirements of doing business, channels represent a kind of ever-changing constant in the banking business. "The channel explosion started in 1970 with the advent of ATMs and call centers and has become an increasingly complex problem for bankers ever since," says Bill Bradway, director of Meridien Research, Newton, Mass. Channel management issues have only increased in complexity with the advent of the internet and wireless communications. As Bradway looks to European markets, where set-top boxes and Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs) are entrenched venues for handling banking, he predicts that likewise in the U.S., channel issues will further intensify. "This is particularly of concern to larger banks with more diverse customer bases and a lot of self-developed systems." Managing these lines to the customer may be a fact of life for most, but the question is, how to do it better? …