Prudential plc is an international financial services group providing retail financial products and services and fund management to customers worldwide. Prudential has been writing life insurance in the United Kingdom for over 150 years and has been the largest long-term fund in the UK for over a century.

Today, Prudential has over 16 million customers worldwide and over US$430 billion of funds under management. Prudential is also the leading European-based life insurer in Asia with 24 operations in 12 countries.

Prudential plc's fund management business in Malaysia is represented by Prudential Fund Management Berhad. It was incorporated in November 2000 and currently manages 17 other unit trust funds valued at RM3 billion (US$842.7 million) as at 30 June 2006. The company has over 3,000 agents nationwide.


Situation

Prudential Fund Management adopts a multiple channel distribution model which includes a network of independent agents and banks. However, a key challenge facing the company is that this model reduces direct customer interaction and feedback since it does not sell directly to the public.

To communicate with customers, it set up several web sites catering to investors, agents and the general public. Investors and the public can download prospectus and get information on products and launches, and fund prices. However, these websites were basically static rather than interactive.

“Our web sites were essentially brochure warehouses. It could not provide feedback on whether the information is useful and relevant to customers,” says Lee Kian Aik, Prudential Fund Management’s Director of Information Technology.

“These sites were built using older technology which did not permit accurate tracking of readership. This made it difficult for us to understand the behavior of customers and be responsive to their needs,” says Lee.

The company realized it needed a new way to communicate and get feedback from customers. At the same time, Prudential’s regional office embarked on a project called ‘Making Sense’ which aims to differentiate itself from the competition by making its materials more simple, engaging and approachable.

She admits information in the websites were sometimes too technical and intimidating to investors and the public. “To simplify our materials and to make it relevant, we need to constantly get feedback from customers. It’s all about giving what the customer wants,” she adds.

“The time has come for us to be more engaging and innovative. The aim of this initiative is to improve communication with the public and investors,” says Judy Yap, Head of Brand and Communications, Prudential Fund Management. We wanted to redesign and make the corporate web sites more interactive, create content that support a “bias for action” and facilitate feedback from customers.

This prompted the company to look for a solution with the capability to track and provide contextual feedback on the behaviour and preferences of its web site visitors. In addition, the system should also help reduce manual processes and speed up the publishing of Web content, says Lee.


Solution

Having been using Microsoft technologies since its inception, Prudential Fund Management had no qualms about choosing Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 as its new online communication and collaboration platform.

“We have been using Microsoft technology since we started, so to us opting for SharePoint Server 2007 is just a matter of adopting another Microsoft component,” he explains. Lee acknowledges that choosing a non-Microsoft solution would entail “very challenging integration work for us.”

Prudential Fund Management decided to participate in the Microsoft Office Rapid Deployment Technology Adoption Program in late 2006. It engaged Microsoft’s Certified Partner CRN Solutions Sdn Bhd to set up a SharePoint Server 2007 pilot project.

The portal is linked to the company's reporting system that runs on Microsoft SQL Server database which in turn is connected to their backend system. At the front-end, staff use Microsoft Office applications such as Word, Excel and PowerPoint to seamlessly create and upload content to the portal.

CRN Solutions took less than two months to develop and roll out a new interactive portal with search capabilities and user authenticated sessions. The portal has undergoing testing since it went online in November 2006.

Yap says the SharePoint project was part of Prudential’s regional ‘Making Sense’ initiative. After a successful roll out in Malaysia, Prudential plans to deploy the solution to its other offices in the region, she adds.

The portal provides granular contents that are linked to strategic contexts covering various subjects, topics and products. While most web sites can record page hits, translating these statistics into business insight remains a challenging task. “For example, what do these page hits mean to a marketing manager, a brand manager or a customer service manager?,” asks Rico Ho, Managing Director of CRN Solutions.

“We use the contextual click-stream session tracker to track how many times and how long a visitor spends on a particular page and translate it into a business contextual visit that makes sense to their own management team. A customer behavior analysis like that delivers much more insight to Prudential’s communication team,” he adds.

The new system also utilizes interesting polls rather than cumbersome surveys which typically have low response rates. “Our polling web-part allows you to put your questions all over the web site that are fun to participate in. Then we consolidate all these and deliver your survey results.”

“We just made what seemed like tedium into a fun task that tells what your customer thinks and whether they are interested in your questions as well!,” Ho says. Yap concurs: “It’s all about simplifying the message and making it fun for readers to give feedback.” While this sounds like common sense, doing it right is another matter – and this is what the ‘Making Sense’ project is all about, she adds.


Benefits

The new portal provides much needed feedback on customer needs , helps in formulating the right strategies, speeds up the publishing of online content and improves compliance pertaining to creation and approval of Web content.

Faster Publishing
A combination of user friendly web site design tools and templates coupled with improved security features enable the respective departments to assume greater control over the publishing of Web content. This will help speed up the creation and publishing of online content by between 50 and 60 percent, says Lee.

“SharePoint Server 2007 enables us to easily collate information from the various departments and produce documents faster. This benefits our investors and customers as it allows us to share knowledge more quickly and efficiently with them,” he adds.

Office SharePoint Designer 2007 provides tools for rich customization of sites without any coding. In addition, Master Pages and Page Layouts provide reusable templates for a consistent look and feel and help enforce the branding and navigation of the company’s web sites.

Giving greater responsibility for publishing online content to the respective departments will ease the workload of the IT Department in managing the web sites. This reduced user dependence on the IT Department improves productivity and enables IT to focus on providing more value-added services, Lee adds.

Strengthens Compliance
SharePoint Server 2007 has made a “tremendous improvement” in helping Prudential Fund Management simplify compliance efforts and monitoring with regards to the publishing of Web content.

Lee says that SharePoint Server 2007 enables the company to easily attach security ratings to documents and track content through document-auditing settings. Built in approval workflow also ensures that Web content is sent for approval prior to publishing.

“We are now using SharePoint rate our articles to indicate whether it is confidential, for internal circulation or for our web sites. This will prevent the accidental publishing of confidential documents online,” he adds.

“The ability to rate documents is a big plus for us. The Risk Management Department is very happy with the SharePoint platform. Not only does it raise employees’ awareness on compliance issues, the department can now enforce regulatory requirements.”

Lee says document versioning is also “very critical” as it reduces the problem of staff opening an older version of a document. SharePoint’s ability to log all actions on sites, content, and workflows ensures greater transparency and accountability.

“Managers used to complain that whole sections of documents have been deleted and no one knows who deleted it. Now with versioning, you can identify who deleted it and also recover it,” says Lee.

Feedback Boost
The sophisticated tracking mechanism of SharePoint Server 2007 enables Prudential Fund Management to monitor Web page views in a way that provides valuable feedback from customers.

The portal is structured with granular contents that are linked to strategic contexts covering various subjects, topics and products. This allows the company to track and analyze page hits in its strategic business context. The portal is also designed to be interactive, encouraging visitors to rate the content, participate in polls, make comments or request to speak to company representatives or agents.

“The whole idea is to translate information on the contextual hits into business value for Prudential Fund Management,” says Yap.

At the regional level, Prudential spends a substantial amount of money to organise programs such as small focus groups to gather face-to-face feedback from customers. The portal complements this by providing the infrastructure and capability to get feedback online from a much wider base of customers at little incremental cost.

“So instead of talking to a small sample group at selected times, this technology empowers us to get direct feedback from our entire customer base all the time,” adds Yap.

Strategic Insight
The ability of the new portal to provide customer feedback enables Prudential Fund Management to make better decisions, formulate effective strategies and reduce wastage, says Lee.

“Previously, the inability to effectively garner online feedback from customers meant we were often walking in the dark. To maintain our leadership, we needed more feedback to gain better insight that would help us to streamline our communication process and serve our customers better,” he says.

By linking the individual visitor behavior to their respective demographic profiles, Prudential can now extrapolate the behavior of certain groups of customers based on the size of their investment portfolios, age or how long they have been investing. This accords it with the ability to tailor specific messages for different groups of customers.

The portal’s ability to track page hits contextually provides the management with information and customer feedback to formulate the right business strategies. “The SharePoint platform certainly ‘makes sense’ as it keeps us from making costly mistakes and helps us make the right decisions to expand our business,” Lee affirms .

Overview
Country or Region: Malaysia
Industry: Finance

Customer Profile
Prudential plc is an international financial services group providing retail financial products and services and fund management to customers worldwide. Prudential has been writing life insurance in the United Kingdom for over 150 years and has been the largest long-term fund in the UK for over a century.

Prudential plc's fund management business in Malaysia is represented by Prudential Fund Management Berhad.


For More Information
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. To access information using the World Wide Web, go to: www.microsoft.com/malaysia

For other case studies in this series, visit www.microsoft.com/malaysia/business/casestudies