The Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA) is one of Australia’s leading financial institutions. CBA provides more than 10 million global customers with integrated financial services such as retail, business and institutional banking, and funds management. Like many large banks, CBA has relied on disparate systems to manage customer accounts. For example, employees used manual, paper-based processes and multiple systems to gather customer information. CBA recently deployed a Microsoft® .NET–connected solution that combines its separate systems into a common application, giving employees an integrated, single view of each customer. As a result, employees can better manage workflow, easily access customer information, and provide better customer service and satisfaction.

One of Australia’s leading financial institutions, the Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA) is one of the largest companies on the Australian Stock Exchange and is included in the Morgan Stanley Capital Global Index. CBA offers integrated financial services such as retail, business and institutional banking, and funds management to more than 10 million global customers.

Like many large banks, CBA has relied on disparate systems to manage customer accounts. CBA employees providing customer service at the bank’s Australian branches—like most in the financial services industry—had long relied on old, inefficient processes and systems to manage customer accounts. In addition to using manual, paper-based methods of keeping track of customer interactions, employees had to access disparate databases to update account information. "Finding the right information on customers sometimes involved using close to a dozen separate applications," says Jason Millett, General Manager, Business Banking Growth Strategy, CBA.

Because CBA employees typically used handwritten notes to keep track of updated customer account information, they had to sift through stacks of paper each day. In addition, because information about debit cards and other CBA products was not accessible through the bank’s system, CBA employees often were forced to call a customer’s original bank branch to order those items. Millett adds that because services provided over the telephone were not recorded in a systematic way, customer service employees would have no knowledge of previous phone contacts with customers when those customers visited a branch in person. "Because of all these things, each individual customer interaction took way too much time," says Millett.

As part of the bank’s recent "Which New Bank" initiative, an AUD$1.5 billion (U.S.$1.13 billion) campaign focused on increased customer service and improved corporate culture, CBA wanted to implement a completely new system that could help improve overall operational efficiency. "We wanted to find a way to streamline our technology," says Millett. "We needed to give our people better tools to help them serve our customers."

In 2003, CBA conceived of a solution named CommSee, which would make it easier to better serve customers and to overcome the constraints of the bank’s legacy systems. One of the first decisions that CBA had to make before embarking on the project was whether it should build internally or hand the project to a third-party vendor. The bank opted for in-house development and after considering other technologies chose Microsoft® .NET connection software due to its performance, scalability, interoperability, and familiarity to developers and engineers, as well as because of the bank’s already strong relationship with Microsoft.

Using the services of solution provider EDS to upgrade the bank’s desktop and branch server infrastructure, and utilizing more than 160 internal software developers, CBA created CommSee, a customer management platform built on the Microsoft .NET Framework, a group of technologies and developer tools that provides organizations the ability to build and connect software applications.

CommSee consists of a smart client application that uses Windows® Forms in Microsoft .NET Framework version 1.1 to integrate data from many different back-end systems using Microsoft ASP.NET Web services. Smart clients are easy-to-install and easy-to-manage applications that utilize local resources and intelligently connect to distributed data sources. Web services enable standards-based interoperability across the myriad of mainframe and legacy systems already deployed within the bank. Many .NET-connected solutions use smart clients, which reside on user hardware such as PCs, portable computers, and Pocket PCs.

The platform, fully deployed as of November 2005, is used by CBA’s 1,000 branches, 1,000 dedicated relationship managers, and seven call centers and operations centers, who together serve a total of 30,000 users. CommSee provides CBA customer service personnel with a common portal that displays customer signatures as well as the documents and financial details pertaining to each of the bank’s customers. Currently, 22.5 million customer documents are available on the CommSee image viewer.

When bank employees log on to CommSee through the Windows XP Professional operating system on their PC, they can view workload and customer referral information, team performance statistics, and documents such as customer debit cards and home loan documents. Employees can also change and view customer financial information in real time. For example, if a customer’s address needs to be changed, the employee clicks a link to open the address field in an editable window.

The solution also contains three areas designed to improve workflow for each employee. These areas list items that need follow-up or completion, give users the ability to monitor the progress of work related to individual customers, and provide CommSee users the ability to click through to all bank applications that are integrated with the system.

CommSee, which cost in the vicinity of AUD$100 million (U.S.$75 million) and was developed with the help of a total of 400 project team members. "We had to do this all within a nine-month period, which was a very tight time frame, considering the number of branches involved," says Millett. "It was a huge undertaking."

The new CommSee solution has given CBA an easy-to-use, fully integrated system that provides CBA front-line employees with a complete view of the customer. In addition, the system gives employees automated workflow capabilities. As a result, CBA staff can perform their jobs more efficiently and provide improved customer service.

In simple terms, CommSee relies on a common portal environment implemented through a smart client application to give CBA employees updated customer information. Because the smart client application helped developers create a fast, easy-to-use system, training the CBA employees was an uncomplicated process. "Several weeks before installing the new hardware (with CommSee installed) at a particular branch, we would send e-learning CDs to each person at that branch," says Millett. "The course only took about two hours for each person to complete. We would then go into that branch on a weekend and deploy the technology, and employees would be ready to use the new hardware and basic CommSee functions by that Monday. All employees would then attend a one- or two-day course (subject to role) on all relevant CommSee functionality over the following two weeks."

CommSee provides CBA staff with a fully integrated system through which they can get a single view of a customer. "It pulls together all our existing data systems and provides a unified customer view complete with every transaction and holding for that customer," says Millett. "As a diverse financial services institution, we had many different systems. But this solution acts almost like a harness to blend them all into one system."

CBA employees can now view all customer documents—including home loan papers, change of address forms, credit card applications, and updated bank deposits—on their screen. "That one screen tells an employee everything he or she needs to know about a customer, whether it’s the time and date of the last interaction or the specific products that customer is interested in," says Millett. "All that information is provided in one view."

Because of the integration of all CBA systems and databases, employees now have the ability to originate services or place customer orders even from bank branches that are not the customer’s home branch. In addition, employees can access a larger range of retail and business products.

CommSee has also given customer service employees at each CBA bank branch the ability to better handle their workloads, through the use of better workflow processes.

Each work request is now tracked from origination to completion. Employees know the request is being handled and can update customers with the progress of loan applications. Managers can reassign work requests to ensure continuity during planned and unplanned employee absences and if particular employees are overloaded. Maintenance requests are sent to the back office, taking the workload and the follow-up from the front-line staff.

Because CommSee is easy to use and improves workflow for CBA employees, it has also greatly increased their efficiency. "We’re not repeating tasks anymore, so we don’t waste much time as a result," says Millett. "We used to spend a lot of time fielding questions from customers, or complaints about service. But now we can address these things much faster, without having to shuffle customers between different customer service agents."

As soon as a bank customer begins talking to a CBA employee, that employee can use CommSee to immediately call up a complete customer profile. The profile contains all account information, including all previous contacts with the bank, phone calls, and branch visits. "This solution helps us gather more data and update it much faster," says Millett. "The total time spent with each customer is shorter, and we can serve more people as a result."

CommSee gives CBA staff a much more effective method of serving customers. "We can originate credit card applications and personal loans right at the point of service," says Millett. "Customers no longer have to make several trips to the branch, improving the customer experience and reducing our customer queues. Everything moves faster with this system."

The bank’s previous systems were composed of a series of isolated, bank-centric applications, says Millett. "CommSee puts the focus on customer-centric services across all of our products and channels. And what is really exciting is that it’s our customers who are telling us that our service has improved."

"Our employees can communicate much better with customers now, because they have this complete view of that person," says Millett. "Employees no longer have to switch between different systems and applications or spend time searching for handwritten notes, so they can spend time actually talking to the customer and providing a customer service experience that customers appreciate."

The result, according to Millett, is a customer management system that enables CBA staff to serve customers better. "With CommSee, we’ve given our people the tools that they need to excel in customer service," he says.

And that is something that could not have happened without the underlying technology, according to John Beggs, Executive General Manager, Global Markets, Technology and CommSee, CBA.

"This project has been unbelievably successful and we couldn’t have accomplished it without Microsoft .NET. It’s a standout in my experience, and everyone who sees it up close says it’s a standout. Part of the success of this was due to the Microsoft .NET technology, which turns out to be an excellent technology in which to do this sort of development," says Beggs.

The project’s success, in fact, has led CBA to make plans to expand CommSee into its wholesale and online retail channels, as well as its adviser platforms. The organization also plans to use CommSee to connect more systems, expose more data, and extend it into real-time financial market data and transaction systems.

Microsoft .NET is software that connects people, information, systems, and devices through the use of Web services. Web services are a combination of protocols that enable computers to work together by exchanging messages. Web services are based on the standard protocols of XML, SOAP, and WSDL, which allow them to interoperate across platforms and programming languages.

.NET is integrated across Microsoft products and services, providing the ability to quickly build, deploy, manage, and use connected, secure solutions with Web services. These solutions provide agile business integration and the promise of information anytime, anywhere, on any device.

For more information about Microsoft .NET and Web services, please visit these Web sites:
www.microsoft.com/net or msdn.microsoft.com/webservices

For more information about Microsoft products and services, call the Microsoft Sales Information Center at (800) 426-9400. In Canada, call the Microsoft Canada Information Centre at (877) 568-2495. Customers who are deaf or hard-of-hearing can reach Microsoft text telephone (TTY/TDD) services at (800) 892-5234 in the United States or (905) 568-9641 in Canada. Outside the 50 United States and Canada, please contact your local Microsoft subsidiary.

For more information about Commonwealth Bank of Australia products and services, call (61) 13-2221 or visit the Web site at: www.commbank.com.au.

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