Wachovia Bank provides full financial services in eleven states in the eastern U.S. and Washington, D.C. The company also offers full-service brokerage with offices in 49 states, as well as global services through more than 30 international offices. Wachovia’s customers include nine million households and 900,000 businesses, with over four million online enrollments. Wachovia offers personal service and objective advice through 2,800 branch financial centers and 600 retail brokerage offices. Over 8,100 registered representatives staff these branches. Wachovia is the fourth largest bank in the United States.

Customer service is a critically important competitive differentiator for Wachovia, as it was for First Union prior to the merger. Customer service representatives (CSRs) are on call 24 hours a day and must have access to current, accurate information at all times to respond to customer inquiries. In the past, however, the First Union system that kept CSRs informed could not keep pace with the rate of change in content. The process of moving content changes through the necessary approval cycle took too long, as did the process of publishing approved content to the CSR intranet. One percent of content changed every day, but changes were published only once a week. For that reason, CSRs learned not to trust the corporate intranet for current information, and instead surrounded themselves with paper documents. Because it took considerable time to sort through these paper documents for information, and because the intranet took thirty seconds to present answers to questions, response time fell short of the bank’s criteria for excellence in customer service.

In late 1999 First Union launched a project to improve the availability of accurate, current information to their CSRs. The overriding goal was to increase the quality of customer service, with efficiency improvement a secondary objective. Thomas Kitrick, who had successfully led similar projects for two other major companies, was hired as Vice President, Knowledge Management.

The bank invited several competitors to present their solutions. “Our research confirmed that Documentum was the answer for us,” Kitrick reported. First Union purchased Documentum in 2000 and began the process of integrating it with its Oracle 8i database. The goal was to provide CSRs with the timely, accurate, approved information they need to reply to customer inquiries, and to support the bank’s policies and procedures for generating and using that information.
The initial solution, which First Union called Directnet 1.0, entered production in summer of 2001. When First Union merged with Wachovia shortly thereafter, the two banks combined their customer service operations into 11 call centers, all of which now use Directnet.

In March of 2002, Wachovia released Directnet 2.0. In Directnet 2.0, information for dealing with customer inquiries is segregated into 13 different portals by specialty. CSRs who deal with consumer inquiries, for example, are not burdened with information that applies only to businesses. The time required to publish new content has been reduced by 75%, which is particularly important when Wachovia is called on to respond to crises. Within an hour of receiving notification on a pager, this employee generates the appropriate content, makes sure it is approved for publication according to the established rules, and posts it in the communication section of the Web site.

Wachovia uses the Gallup service for assessing customer satisfaction. Over the period from May of 2001, just before Directnet was first released, to April 2002, Wachovia’s index of retail customers’ satisfaction with their calls rose steadily from 5.7 to 6.4, an increase of 12%.