FleetBoston expanding system that matches customers, services

FleetBoston Financial Corp. is moving ahead with a major expansion of its customer relationship management (CRM) sales system.

The Boston-based financial services company plans to connect its automated Managing Local Markets (MLM) data analysis CRM application to some 325 new branches in the next few months. Based on EnAct from Xchange Inc., a Boston-based software provider, MLM combines internal information with data on local markets and presents it to end users to enhance sales effectiveness.

With MLM, branch managers and front-line salespeople can identify and match the best prospects for its financial products, explained Maura Fairbanks, manager of the retail distribution group at Fleet.

The new system will enable branch managers to query Fleet's central database and run different types of searches about which customers to target. The queries can be based on different parameters such as a customer's age, types of bank accounts, whether the customer has children or whether he owns a home, said Fairbanks.

Until now, bank employees have had to cull through thousands of pages of lists to gather pertinent data, a process that could take hours or even days, said Fairbanks.

Fleet has offices from New Jersey to Maine, each one with products or promotions unique to its area, she said. Branch managers can use MLM independently to sell services by phone, by e-mail, during customer visits or in coordination with the central marketing office.

"That's the beauty of the product; it's not a cookie cutter," Fairbanks said. "It takes centralized marketing to a higher degree. ... It allows the branch manager to do customization to fit their markets."

Fleet, which has already installed MLM in 900 of its branches, plans to extend it to the remaining smaller branches by June. Sometime later this year, the bank expects to roll out the system to the 500 branches it acquired from Princeton, N.J.-based Summit Bancorp, Fairbanks said.

Fleet is one of the first financial institutions to get marketing data out of the back office and into the hands of front-line workers, said Kim Collins, an analyst at Gartner Group Inc. in Stamford, Conn. Typically, most banks use such data for things like centralized mass-mailing campaigns. In this case, Fleet personnel learn specific sales methods that they can use to fully exploit the CRM data, she said.

Collins noted that Fleet implemented the CRM system in 1997 after finding that 30% of its customers were creating 130% of its revenue -- and another 30% were actually a financial drain. Fleet then shifted its focus so it could