Deutsche Bank uses social CRM to fine-tune corporate banking

Social media is driving product development at Deutsche Bank. The banking giant is using web 2.0 technologies to engage with 1,000 of its corporate customers, to find out how it can make corporate banking run more smoothly.

At the Gartner CRM Summit in London, Alexander Drobik, managing vice-president at Gartner, discussed how social media is becoming a tool businesses use to interact with their customers.

The bank's Drive DB! strategy has received feedback from 1,000 customers. "We asked them to vote on features they wanted to see and ended up with with 27 customer product ideas," said Russell Graham, global head of implementation and service, trade, finance and cash management at Deutsche Bank.

Graham and his team have spent the past three years working to improve how customers interact with the bank. "In the 1990s price was the main criteria corporate clients measured when choosing a bank. In 2004, this moved to technology. Now customers make their choice based on service."

The bank's customers expect transparency, committed delivery times, reliability of execution and a seamless transition when switching banks. "Our customers want us to get it right first time. They want us to understand their business language."

This has meant establishing a global standard, but giving different regions flexibility. In terms of software, it uses a service oriented architecture, Documentum for document management and Pegsystems for CRM.

A global standard means that customer information is stored once. Drobik describes this policy as a form of master data management, which is essential to make the most of customer relationship management.

The bank is also starting to offer apps for its corporate clients, which they can use in their own treasury systems to transact with Deutsche Bank.

Deutsche Bank is one of the found members of the Open Data Center Alliance, along with Shell, UBS, BMW and 70 other firms, that aims to develop enterprise cloud computinh standards.

Box: Layered approach to apps

Gartner is beginning to discuss an approach to corporate application development that sorts different applications into layers. The bottom layer is, effectively, core IT systems, such as an e-commerce transaction system, which may take years to develop. The iPhone has shown that users also want simple applications - apps - that may take just a few days to develop. These may be used for short marketing campaigns. Clearly, the rigour applied to a core system does not need to be applied to an app, but the app is still essential for business.