Union bank of norway for MKTG 4760 - Essay Example

Union Bank of Norway – Case Analysis Union bank of Norway had a huge base with over a million commercial and residential customers and was Norway’s largest savings bank. The bank had done very well to shield itself from the economic downturn during the time. The bank had managed this by providing its customers automated ways to use the services of the bank. Automated teller machines, web and telephone based technologies were used to enable customers to do their banking without actually coming down to the bank.

This meant that the bank had successfully driven its customers to low cost channels. These gave the bank the advantage over its competitors and remain affected by the economic turmoil. The above strategy of the company also bought about a crisis. As customers were offered automated ways to use their services, they now did not have to physically come to the bank. This meant that the staffs in the various branches were not able to have direct communication with the customers. That is, the bank no more had direct access to its customer and in turn did not know what their customers wanted.

This was a dangerous place to be in for any business. A business can only sustain and grow only by knowing what the customer wants and according developing the business. Hence, it was very important for the bank to find a way out of this crisis.In order to come out of this crisis the company had to consolidate the information (customer data) available to them about the customers through its automated services. But the main problem here was that the customer data was spread across many systems and it would take days to accumulate and consolidate this data.

The bank concluded that the only way to overcome this was to get a have all the customer data from different systems at one place. This would give them the complete view of the customers.The bank then acquired a data warehouse with the aim of consolidating the customer data from various systems and makes it available to its employees on a single centralised platform where they could analyse it. This helped the bank in numerous ways. The bank was now able to identify who their customers were, their interests, their buying behaviour, etc.

This also gave the bank the 360-degree view of the customer. The bank was now in a better position to understand what their customers wanted and designs their products and services accordingly.The data warehouse solved the problem of not understanding the customer but the communication with customer was still a problem. Hence, in order to overcome this, the bank added CRM functionality to its data warehouse infrastructure. This enabled the bank to improve its communication channel and in turn achieve greater customer satisfaction.

This resulted in an overall increase in the bank’s business.