Project: International DNA

Business goal: To provide Barclays Bank's international sales staff with faster access to better information in order to identify sales.

Award sponsor: Savvis

For the sales team at Barclays International Bank's (IB) offshore call centres, having accurate, up to the minute information on customers is vital. The better they ‘know' the lead in question, the more chance they have of pitching the product that customer needs.

Unfortunately, easy access to customer knowledge had eluded them for some time. Legacy systems were not able to present the data quickly enough, nor could the systems provide feedback about the effectiveness of marketing campaigns.

The IB marketing team sought the help of Barclays' own development team, Concept Labs, in looking for a leads management system that could support a well-informed and fully auditable sales operation.

Concept Labs developed ‘IB DNA' using the Agile Development methodology. This technique involves repeated iterations of the application, which were assessed by both the IB marketing department and the staff who were to use it. The project took under 12 weeks and cost just over £100,000.

The new system draws information from the marketing department's data warehouse, which profiles every customer's suitability to a particular campaign. This is compiled in a database with basic customer information, such as products they already hold, and an expiry date is evaluated for each lead, ensuring that they will be contacted at a relevant time.

All leads relating to a particular campaign are presented to all the sales staff. They may choose leads they wish to work on, and team leaders have the ability to reassign leads to other staff, for instance if the expiry date is approaching and someone is off sick.

Sales staff have a simple set of drop down menus with which to record their success on each lead. This feeds back to the marketing department, so they can check on a campaign's success, and enables staff to monitor their own performance as they work.

Originally, the project was rolled out to the call centre on the Isle of Man in October 2004. Since then, the rate of conversion from sales calls to actual sales has doubled to 10% – generating roughly £6 million in additional business for the bank. IB DNA is to be rolled out to other offshore islands and to Hong Kong and South Africa.

Efficiently developed and well designed, IB DNA draws together Barclays International Bank's customer knowledge to not just streamline the selling process, but to provide the customer with what they want, when they want it.