This month, we look to the burgeoning Asia-Pacific market. In the growing financial services industry, Taiwan's Chinatrust Commercial Bank (CTCB) is putting its money where its mouth is in terms of building the value of its customer base.
With approximately 5 million customers, CTCB is the leading retail financial services institution in Taiwan. In 2004, its Consumer Business Unit recorded a strong growth of 22 percent, due in part to a switch toward long-term thinking.
"To be successful, we needed to transform from what was a sales-driven organization into a customer-centric organization," says Michael Sung, SVP of Strategic Marketing. It began in 2003 with a corporate-wide slogan, We Are Family. Since then, CTCB has made significant investments in data warehousing and analytical CRM, collaborating with Teradata, a division of NCR. More than 300 employees company-wide now use reporting, analytical and modeling tools based on detailed customer data. This includes segmentation strategy planning, profitability value contribution, needs and behavior analysis, event-based marketing and other multi-step, multi-channel customer communications designed to build customer value.
"Not so long ago, customers would be shocked to discover that their bank is contacting them after they had made a significant deposit," says Sung. "The times have changes, and so have customer attitudes. These days, customers in the Taiwanese marketplace expect their bank to look after them and their needs, and therefore the time is right for us to establish a one-to-one environment whereby we can build on our positioning as a family bank that provides close care for its customers."
In the future, Sung says Chinatrust will focus on learning even more about customers and acting on that data, including more lifecycle management and customer lifetime value measurements.
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