One of the world’s largest financial services providers assessed the workload and productivity of its 16,000 financial advisors, and the results were not pretty. This Fortune 50 firm found that its customer-facing representatives were spending:

• 70% of their time searching for and reconciling data on customers and products
• 30% of their time on revenue-generating activities, such as cross-sell and up-sell

That’s a pretty poor ratio, and it hurt the bottom line with subpar productivity and lost revenue opportunities. Unfortunately, it’s not uncommon in financial services and other industries. And experience has shown that whatever you think your company’s ratio is, the reality is probably worse.

Attract and Retain Customers with Trusted and Complete Data

But it’s also a solvable problem, as you can find in our new white paper, “Get on the Fast Track to Maximizing Customer Value.”

For this financial services firm, the root cause of the problem was that business-critical data about customers, their products and services was spread across account-centric system silos, which prevented them from gaining a customer-centric view. Financial advisors were unable to readily identify which clients had which products. Without that insight, they couldn’t effectively cross-sell and up-sell the right products to the right customers. So they were forced to spend excessive time manually pulling information from all these separate systems into a spreadsheet.

To make matters worse, advisors couldn’t accurately measure each client’s value to the institution. The firm couldn’t tailor service levels to customer profitability, meaning that expensive services might be provided to customers of marginal profitability—while high-value customers didn’t receive the attention they deserved.

The solution: Transitioning to a customer-centric view with the Informatica Customer Centricity Solution, with Informatica MDM at its core. By operationalizing customer centricity—embedding it in day-to-day operations—the firm boosted the productivity of its 16,000 financial advisors by 30% and triggered a $50 million annual revenue impact.

For the first time, financial advisors could cross-sell and up-sell based on a single view of customers and their products, as well as customers’ valuable relationships with family, businesses and employees. They could better tailor services to individual client needs and value. The result is a win-win for both the firm and its customers. As the firm’s director of Global Wealth Management Technology put it:

“[Informatica MDM] affords us the opportunity to leverage our information assets in an innovative way to drive revenue-generating business solutions and enhance client experience and services. Customer Centricity includes gaining a complete understanding of our clients, their roles and the events that drive client behavior.”

You can learn more about how the firm tackled its problems in our new white paper—and get ideas on how your organization can transition to customer centricity, too.