Bell Bank created a unified view of customer data across eight different systems using Data Ladder. The integration allowed them to handle customer matching efficiently, enhancing cross-selling opportunities and marketing efforts. Data Ladder powered their customer 360, ensuring personalized service across the bank.
- Improved customer matching accuracy across 8 systems
- Integrated customer data for marketing and reporting
- Reduced manual workload for their development team
About Bell Bank
Bell Bank is one of the largest independently owned banks in the U.S., providing personal, business, and wealth management services. Known for its exceptional customer service, Bell Bank’s differentiator lies in its focus on personalized experiences, powered by unified data across multiple touchpoints.
Challenge
Creating a Customer 360 View Across Eight Different Systems
Before partnering with Data Ladder, Bell Bank faced the challenge of unifying customer data from eight separate systems. Maintaining data accuracy and consistency was critical to their customer service efforts, especially when dealing with complex records, such as name variations (e.g., Robert vs. Bob). Their existing code-based matching process relied on exact string matches, which created gaps in their customer 360 view.
Alternative solutions tested by Bell Bank were manual, code-heavy, and limited by the bank’s existing systems. For example, matching by exact strings made it difficult to consolidate records, which impacted their ability to provide seamless service and marketing to their customers. The stakes were high — without solving this, Bell Bank risked losing cross-sell opportunities and offering fragmented customer experiences.
Solution
Enhancing Customer 360 with Data Ladder’s IBM DB2 Integration
Bell Bank chose Data Ladder due to its compatibility with IBM DB2, where their core data sits, and the CASS address verification and geolocation features, which were crucial for their marketing and reporting needs.
Through Data Ladder, Bell Bank integrated its systems and matched customer records efficiently, using SSNs, names, and dates of birth as primary data points. These matches were processed through Bell’s .NET application, with results exported to SQL Server for further use. The bank’s developers interact with Data Ladder via the command line, ensuring that their matching process stays seamless and accurate.
The data flows from their SQL Server back into their .NET app, Salesforce for marketing, and the bank’s data warehouse, empowering the entire business — from analytics and BI dashboards to cross-selling opportunities at the branch level.
To address frequent name variation issues, Data Ladder significantly reduced false mismatches. Additionally, Bell Bank integrated address matching into the system, allowing their insurance team to enhance lead accuracy and optimize their ad-hoc reporting.
Results
Reducing Fragmented Data and Driving Customer-Centric Service
- Improved Customer Matching: Bell Bank unified customer data from eight systems, ensuring a holistic 360-degree view.
- Enhanced Marketing: Data integration into Salesforce and the data warehouse enabled more accurate targeting and cross-selling, contributing to higher customer satisfaction.
- Streamlined Processes: The ability to use geolocation and address verification added value across teams, from insurance to banking.
With Data Ladder, Bell Bank’s IT team reduced the manual work needed for managing multiple environments (dev, test, prod) and improving error handling. By enabling the creation of a more comprehensive customer profile, Bell Bank enhanced their customer service delivery.
Looking ahead, Bell Bank is considering further automating their project promotions across different environments, and exploring more advanced matching capabilities to further improve their data accuracy.
