Southcoast Community Bank

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Southcoast Community Bank was founded in 1998 to serve the banking needs of small businesses in the Charleston, SC area. Southcoast is a state chartered commercial bank serving local restaurants, dentists, small manufacturers, import/exporters and more. The bank is locally owned and operated, and was recognized in 2002 as one of the top 25 fastest growing companies in South Carolina. In addition to traditional consumer and commercial services, Southcoast Bank offers mortgage loan origination services, credit cards, tax deposits, travelers checks and a variety of other services. Southcoast has also established a 24-hour automated teller network throughout the Tri-County area. Southcoast’s customers bank with the company because of the strong local presence and one-to-one personal touch.  And with more than 35,000 customers, Southcoast’s strategy of personal attention for the successful business owner has proven to be a solid approach.

The Challenge

Financial institutions have long been leaders in business process automation, largely because the basic end-product is numbers. However, the automation tools haven’t been comprehensive enough to enable banks to merge their silos of data such as account information located in one place and customer information located in another. And adding new process automation with any level of ease meant there must be a connection to the bank’s core operating system, which for Southcoast is Microsoft Windows. When Southcoast began to look for a CRM solution that targeted banks, they found several options, but they proved to be cumbersome, difficult to configure and most importantly, didn’t take advantage of the power of the Windows environment. The bank started their search with a popular contact manager software. They purchased 30 licenses and found it to be a poor fit because of the time required on the part of the users to maintain it and its difficult multi-user functionality. The lending department was using a manual information collection process for the commercial lending pipeline which made it difficult to get real time data. There were also manual loan approval and review processes, and the collections department had their share of manual processes as well, which made it difficult for lenders to keep abreast of the collections efforts.

“There were really two initial goals for the CRM solution,” said Gerri Sandford, IT Consultant, Southcoast Bank.  “First, to get the lenders onto a system that would allow them to enter the information associated with commercial projects they were working on. Second, our collections person was recording his collection calls on paper – if you asked him about a particular situation, he referred to his notes. We absolutely had to automate that process.”

Another solution was advertised as “plug-in” software for Microsoft Outlook with some CRM features. But the solution wasn’t scalable enough to achieve Southcoast’s CRM goals. About that time Paul Hollen, Southcoast Bank’s EVP and COO, attended a seminar sponsored by Microsoft, which demonstrated Microsoft Dynamics CRM and Microsoft Sharepoint. Hollen liked what he saw and asked Microsoft to recommend an implementation partner. Microsoft advised Hollen to contact Customer Effective.

“We really liked the Microsoft solution for a number of reasons,” Sandford adds. “The backend was SQL, as a lot of our systems already were so we didn’t have to worry about systems integration. The solution is incredibly flexible and the ability to utilize Scribe [data migration software] was attractive so you didn’t have to continually recreate customer data during implementation.”

The Solution

After some initial meetings with Customer Effective which included a detailed demonstration and discussion of Southcoast’s CRM configuration, Hollen was convinced he’d found the right partner.

“I knew after our initial meetings with Customer Effective that this was a good fit,” says Hollen. “I knew I could work with them on this project and I have not been disappointed. They’ve been very responsive on an individual level and a business level and the talent there is second to none.”

Customer Effective acted as an extension of Southcoast’s IT team during the implementation, analyzing the business processes the bank was trying to automate. The bank’s initial foray into contact management and CRM meant that they already knew how they wanted the configuration to look, and relied on Customer Effective’s team of CRM experts, who implemented the solution exactly as the bank needed it in record time. In fact, the initial implementation was done in a matter of weeks.

“Not once did Customer Effective try to sell us something we didn’t need,” adds Hollen. “They came in and did the work that needed to be done and we were able to begin the roll out after just three weeks.” “I was impressed with the responsiveness of our team at Customer Effective,” said Sandford. “If you call them and say ‘this is what I’m trying to accomplish,’ they really think it through, come back with the best solution and help you put it in place. We are delighted with the service we received.”

Today the lending department at Southcoast Bank can obtain loan approvals via Microsoft CRM, generate live reports to the second for use in monthly board meetings, and even access collections information on accounts, as that data is also entered and tracked through Microsoft CRM. The primary goal of CRM with Southcoast Bank was to be able to accurately track opportunities and referrals however they may flow within the company - from the branch staff to the lenders, or vice versa. But Microsoft CRM’s ability to provide an overall view of ALL interactions with a customer has also been extremely helpful for the bank when it comes to providing superior customer service, the very reason many of Southcoast’s customers choose to conduct their banking there.

“Our customers tell us they love our hands-on approach, but it gets tougher and tougher,” adds Hollen. “Microsoft CRM helps us maintain the personal service. I now have access to all interaction records with each customer regardless of the group they’ve dealt with here and that’s invaluable.”

If You Build it, They Will Come

As a bank that has built the success of its business on a personalized, one-to-one customer approach, Southcoast wants to continue to drive customer traffic to the branches in order to promote its superior service. As a result, the bank has plans to expand its use of Microsoft CRM in order to help achieve this goal. Today the bank utilizes Microsoft CRM primarily for sales/opportunity and pipeline management, with plans to expand its use of the marketing component by incorporating business intelligence data into Microsoft CRM, thereby enabling the bank to intelligently market to its prospect base, create effective business development campaigns and bring more people into the branches. With the right CRM solution in place, Southcoast Bank can continue to offer and deliver the high-touch, personal service that has made it a tremendous success with small business owners. The lending department and collections are now using Microsoft CRM every day, and Southcoast plans to bring the financial services group onto the system next and eventually roll it out to the entire company.

“It’s a great product,” adds Sandford. “We are just brushing the surface of what we’d like to do with this in the future. We will continue to customize and expand our Microsoft CRM system for a long time to come at Southcoast Bank.”