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E-mail made easier at Wells Fargo
From Banking Systems and Technology
March Issue
"For starters, we're using [Rapport] for managing e-mails and its workflow
system to manage the response to those e-mails," said George Cheng, senior
vice president of the $205 billion bank's Internet Services Group. "In a
broader sense, it's a system that facilitates customer relationship
management [CRM] and, through the workflow, is tied into our back-end
systems."
Before implementing Rapport, the San Francisco-based bank relied on a
cobbled-together system of outside products and internal workflow
development to manually manage e-mail replies, Cheng explained. By early
1999, the need for a more scalable, robust system became apparent.
"In addition, Banter has a well-structured knowledge base and analysis
engine at the core in order to automate some of the activity," he said.
"That's why we decided to migrate our homegrown system into Rapport."
Rapport 3.0 is centered around a Relationship Modeling Engine (RME), which
enables the system to intercept, analyze, react to and learn from any
customer communication, regardless of format, Banter reported. Through
"systematic classification," Rapport can identify and understand the intent
of an e-mail, gather and present data from within the enterprise in response
and simultaneously recommend an automatic or semi-automatic action.
That process, termed a "relationship event," then is fed into Rapport's
Adaptive Knowledge Base, allowing the product to learn from each interaction
and react more efficiently in subsequent exchanges.
At presstime, Wells Fargo had not yet implemented the automated response
feature, which is contingent on further testing of the knowledge database.
The bank's Y2K "lockdown," near the time of Rapport's installation, also had
delayed testing and deployment of the solution.
"We won't turn on an automatic response mode until we are comfortable that
the analysis and knowledge database is sufficient," Cheng said. "So while
the system generates a recommended response, at this point we still have
people looking at it."
An early adopter, Wells Fargo also provided input into Rapport's
development. "The product is relatively new, and Banter is turning out new
releases," Cheng said. "We were able to feed our requirements to them, which
they incorporated into their standard product." That eased configuration of
the product for use at the bank, which Cheng described as "more of an
administrative process than a programming one."
For now, Rapport isn't fully integrated with operations at Wells Fargo's
online call center, which already employs another set of tools to handle
voice calls and e-mails or other databases on the back end. "It's not as
integrated as we'd like it to be yet," Cheng said, "but we see Rapport as
the base we can build that call center upon."
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