With CGI, AXA Australia boosts customer retention with new business model

"Recommending a solution for AXA Australia's business architecture, CGI helped identify the key business changes required to improve its customer retention target by more than 200 percent."

The Client
As one of the largest global financial services companies and leader in wealth management, with total revenues of €890 billion, the France-based AXA Group has a global presence focused on the world's major developed countries. AXA Australia is part of AXA Asia-Pacific, one the most widely represented financial services companies in the Asia-pacific region operating in nine markets and managing funds of A$41 billion in Australia and New Zealand.

With a view to increasing overall shareholder return, AXA Australia needed to improve retention of its funds under management (FUM) to deliver on a 2003 retention target of A$400 million, more than double the 2002 target. This meant improving its customer relationship management (CRM) program and implementing business metrics to support the tracking and management of customer value, campaign effectiveness and other processes. But the business effect of a CRM change program was difficult to foresee, since AXA Australia was not set up with the type of operating model, business model or analytical tools needed to successfully support its new target strategy.

The Challenge
In a competitive bid, AXA Australia chose CGI in 2002 as its strategic partner. CGI's CRM leadership and expertise, in-depth industry knowledge and collaborative approach demonstrated the know-how required to improve AXA Australia's customer retention by more than 200 percent over the previous period's goals.

The Strategy
During an intense six-week period, the joint CGI/AXA team started with an assessment of AXA Australia's operations-including the overall business model and strategic objectives, organizational structure, retention progress to date and retention-related business metrics-and compared this with the desired state to determine how to realign the business. Applying CGI's proven CRM framework and industry best practices, CGI helped AXA Australia identify the key business drivers as well as validate the feasibility of achieving its 2003 retention targets.

Working together with AXA Australia, CGI recommended a solution for structuring AXA's business architecture with a business-as-usual (BAU) operational model and organizational model. The operational model included process flows, recommended metrics and data requirements; the organizational model included new organizational structures, responsibilities, job descriptions, incentives and management processes.

CGI helped revise AXA Australia's existing CRM roadmap to support this model and included an infrastructure development plan for timely deployment of critical technology components. The overall solution leveraged CGI's proprietary methodologies for organizational development, change management and process renewal to ensure a seamless integration. The output of the solution included:

• Data analytics to dramatically improve current capabilities for data-driven analysis by identifying high-value, at-risk clients for retention targeting
• A cross-functional retention strategy team to provide thought leadership on the design and execution of retention initiatives based on the data-driven analysis. Strategies are to evolve based on reported results while bridging product and financial objectives with customer retention strategies
• Increased involvement from all business areas to broaden the types of personnel and retention techniques, such as using call centers, campaigns and direct-to-adviser initiatives

Following the completion of the first six-week phase, CGI continued to support AXA Australia with implementation of the CRM strategy for three more months, working alongside key AXA resources to deploy the recommendations and continue the critical knowledge transfer.

The Results
Implementing a new business model and a CRM strategy to support it, AXA Australia exceeded its retention targets by A$35 million for retaining funds under management. CGI's proven approach and CRM expertise ensured focus, collaboration and measurable benefits well above the business plan target.

With a scalable infrastructure in place, AXA Australia is now in the position to move beyond customer retention to leverage CRM data for continued profitability through up-selling and cross-selling opportunities-setting AXA Australia apart from the competition.