Analysis on Citizens National Bank

(Here Today. Here Tomorrow. Here since 1868.)

Citizens national bank was found in 1868. It is the third oldest independent bank in Texas. The privately held community bank prefers to concentrate on midsize communities. This is called working in spades Strategy. Years ago, the board and senior officers of CNB realized that a new form of banking was on the horizon. The bank made a commitment not only to invest in the best electronic tools for customers to use, but also devoted its energies and finances for a technological infrastructure to safeguard and advance the capabilities of the bank.

The challenge:

The initial problems that Mark Singleton, president and CEO of the bank was trying to solve at Citizens National is to improve tracking of customer prospects and boost the number of contacts and sales made by the bank's team of 16 sales representatives or the relationship bankers, as they were called. Citizens bank was tracking the customer contact activity on a paper, in an old-fashioned way. The bank's CEO and branch-office managers found it tedious to plow through all the information. "There was tons of good information in there, but nobody could find it all", he said.

Being an old-school, relationship-type banker, even though he likes a direct customer contact, he recognized the great value that automated systems provided to businesses. He wanted an efficient CRM system with a goal to arm his relationship bankers with every possible shred of knowledge and information about the customers. "We needed the ability to store the interactions our relationship bankers were having with potential customers electronically", he said.

Siebel - Solution with more problems:

Citizens National spent three years trying to make its Siebel CRM implementation work. The Siebel package, which had cost $150,000, was supposed to fulfill the goals, Singleton had for the CNB. The bank contracted with a local consulting firm, The Small Business Solution of Frisco, Texas to help install the package. The union of old-fashioned business sensibility with powerful enterprise software was a mismatch almost immediately. It was highly complex for simple business needs.

Organization mismatch:

The approach of Citizens National toward nearly all business functions, from tracking customer leads to generating reports about them, was very basic. The Siebel software was simply too rich in features. The bank spent way too much amount of time switching off features that hindered productivity. Employees found the software to be too complicated to use. It was also very costly; with $150,000 of purchase price and $350,000 in integration costs .Not much was mentioned about the training costs that were incurred to educate the employees and management about the Siebel CRM system.

Technology mismatch:

The complexity of Siebel system led to many issues that the bankers faced.

* The system was difficult to navigate. For instance, the system did not automatically

generate potential business opportunities for customers on their records. They had to assign the potential transaction to the customer. Furthermore, bankers were not able to view multiple relationships between a customer and the bank on the same screen. It was very confusing.

* Siebel had a complex module for handling customer support cases. It included capabilities for detailed managing of complaints from initial call through subsequent calls to options for resolving