Northern Trust invests in client services with Dynamics 365 Customer Service

Aging systems limit responsive, personalized service

When it comes to investing, innovative technology that enables real-time analytics and responses isn’t just important—it’s essential. The Asset Servicing business unit at Northern Trust understands this well because they support both global asset owners and asset managers who depend on the exceptional service and financial expertise that Northern Trust delivers to thousands of clients worldwide.

A key method of day-to-day communication between Northern Trust and its clients is email. For more than a decade, the company relied on a highly customized on-premises customer relationship management (CRM) solution and Microsoft Outlook. Emails from clients were routed to more than 12,000 shared Outlook mailboxes that were managed by product-specific functional teams and were disconnected from the client attributes in the CRM. More than 17 million emails—internal as well as external from clients and third parties—passed through these mailboxes every month, a significant volume for its 15,000 global employee base to manually track. This volume, the result of organic growth, expansion into new countries, and business acquisitions, was good for the company’s bottom line but caused headaches for employees. According to Shaelyn Otikor-Miller, SVP, Head of Global Digital Workplace Strategy, Northern Trust Asset Servicing, “We were spending a lot of time and effort manually tracking client queries and didn’t have real-time analytics to derive productivity opportunities to service clients faster.”

Complexity leads to confusion

It didn’t help that cases varied widely in complexity. Some client emails were brief and easily resolved. But many others included multiple questions or issues that needed the attention of different functional teams and product experts. Managing the external queries triggered more internal queries between teams which further compounded the issue, adding more time and confusion to a fractured workflow model. As the business expanded, this model became unwieldy, especially because it couldn’t distinguish between intra-team workflow emails and external client email traffic. With such high volumes and team members in many locations and time zones, it was challenging to adequately track statuses, ensure adherence to service level agreements (SLAs), or proactively oversee client queries tied to regulatory deadlines.

Eventually, the limitations contributed to longer response times and provided minimal key performance indicators (KPIs) to help manage decision-making, all of which affected the company’s ability to deliver the timely, personalized service that clients expect from Northern Trust. But the impact on SLAs wasn’t the only challenge. Their legacy CRM system was beginning to display technical vulnerabilities due to its age. It required significant IT support to maintain and to manage risk.

By 2021, Northern Trust Asset Servicing President Pete Cherecwich determined it was time to enhance their client service and delivery model by implementing a digital workplace transformation. "At Northern Trust we don't just service our clients, we become part of their daily operations," he explained. "This requires workplace technology that enables faster response times, insightful solutioning, and increased efficiencies within our global servicing model."

Finding the right solution for the real problem

After consulting with external researchers, peers, and other Northern Trust business units that had already transitioned from legacy systems, the Asset Servicing business selected Microsoft Dynamics 365. But an assessment of internal processes and pain points revealed that the problem wasn’t with the legacy CRM alone. As Otikor-Miller says, “We quickly realized we didn’t only have a CRM issue—we had a workflow issue.” Operating models were outdated, based on technology available at the time, which would make transitioning to a new system much harder.

The group also recognized that it needed a solution that was highly flexible and customizable to accommodate the needs of 15 internal business groups servicing two very different clients: asset owners and asset managers. Each group is unique in the clients, products, and regions it manages. The Asset Servicing leadership also felt strongly that employees needed a certain amount of autonomy to develop low-code custom solutions to further automate manual, time-consuming processes.

The business learned that Dynamics 365 offers both robust customer service and relationship management capabilities and industry-standard, best-practice workflows that are comprehensive, flexible, and efficient. And Northern Trust was already using many Microsoft products that could be integrated seamlessly. During the consideration period, Microsoft built a prototype system for the group’s evaluation. The prototype included Digital Voice and Teams Chat integration to show how the omnichannel capabilities of Dynamics 365 could enable client touchpoints from solely email to digital voice, chat, and self-service bots, allowing clients to communicate with their service teams through their preferred channels.

Leadership recognized that each of their business specific needs could be met in one platform, consolidating digital communication and collaboration tools into a single platform. Employees appreciate that Dynamics 365 offers an intuitive and easy to learn user interface. The team concluded that Dynamics 365 Customer Service with omnichannel engagement capabilities was the best solution for the Asset Servicing business.

Partnering accelerates progress

Identifying what needed to change was only half the solution. To bring the idea to fruition, Northern Trust chose PwC as its implementation partner. Together they developed a solution architecture and target operating model blueprint, mapped the data migrations, engaged hundreds of stakeholders to develop persona-based user stories and requirements, and performed in-depth testing to prepare for a large-scale digital workplace transformation.

When issues were reported, PwC was there to assist, and the team reached out to Microsoft at any time for as-needed support. According to Otikor-Miller, “Microsoft doesn’t ignore our concerns or spend months resolving. They solve system limitations quickly to make the platform better for everyone. They actively engage our end-users to see how we are using the platform, make suggestions for improving our models, and anything they can’t solve for today – they ensure it’s put through their feature development cycle for release in the next wave of rollouts. At no point during the implementation did I feel we weren’t being heard.” 

Northern Trust Asset Servicing began its digital transformation with Dynamics 365 in July 2022 and went live in February 2023 with 1,000 sales and relationship management users on the new CRM platform. The workflow platform was rolled out in phases starting in January 2023 and concluded in August 2023 for 1,000 operations and servicing staff members using 400 mailboxes—a truly impressive timeline, given the scope of the project. The company is now planning its 2024 expansion which will see another 4,000 client-facing operational team members onboard to workflow, in addition to launching digital voice and chat omni channels.

Digital transformation produces dividends

Northern Trust launched its Digital Partner Platform powered by Dynamics 365 with three goals in mind: provide enhanced service to its clients, improve organizational agility and efficiency while reducing risk, and increase employees’ capacity and productivity. Not only did it achieve all three goals, but for the first time, management has an integrated 360-degree view of client health, servicing team performance, trends and opportunities, all on an easy-to-use singular dashboard. And along with high-level executive summaries, leaders can now generate granular views of client email-to-case traffic to proactively manage issues before they occur.

The company is experiencing these benefits daily in many ways:

Unified data allows for faster and more informed decision-making

Dynamics 365 quickly serves up reports, charts, comparisons, trends, and other data analyses that previously had to be collected from disparate systems and built by hand in spreadsheets. Having information readily accessible puts management in a stronger position—and saves valuable time—when they’re strategizing with and presenting to clients. And when they’re travelling, they can view and even update on-demand reports in a mobile app.

Compliance with governmental regulations is significantly streamlined

The financial services industry is heavily regulated and the requirements of each country where Northern Trust does business are loaded into Dynamics 365, informing deadlines and answers to client queries and KPI reports. Partners no longer have to search for the information or wonder if they have the most up-to-date version of a regulatory guideline.

Automated workflows reduce manual processes and increase efficiency and accuracy

With Dynamics 365 organizing and tracking cases, it’s easy to see at a glance who’s working on a task, what its status is, what more is needed, whether any SLAs are at risk, and other information. Batch processes and auto-reply emails are routed to remove much of the mailbox “noise” so that employees can focus on essential client communications—30% faster, on average. One team has seen a 50% decrease in case traffic due to more efficient processes.

Client engagement and satisfaction are higher due to faster responses

Granular case activity reporting and the promoter score, both parts of Dynamics 365 Customer Service, show that employees are answering requests faster and clients are responding with higher satisfaction ratings. Management can more easily see which clients are satisfied or at risk to get ahead of potential issues quickly.

Unified access to global SLAs ensures timely, consistent action

Dynamics 365 stores all SLA requirements and securities rules, regulations, and legal requirements for each country where Northern Trust does business. All the information is at the fingertips of relationship managers in every location so there’s no guesswork. The case dashboard can be sorted by the deadline date to quickly see which ones to prioritize each day.

Integration of Microsoft Teams enables teams to collaborate faster

Employees are no longer sending emails back and forth internally to resolve queries. Cases are now shared from Dynamics into Teams chats and channels where all experts can quickly opine and all communication associated with the case is captured on the case timeline for ease of reference and audit trail.

Flexibility to customize allows teams to personalize workflows

Teams can use no-code/low-code options to modify Dynamics 365 Customer Service and Teams to better meet their needs without disrupting the rhythm of business. They are able to extend the workflow outside of Dynamics to other third-party systems using Power Platform to fully automate end-to-end processing.

In-depth, on-demand reporting gives leadership insights they need

The new solution allows leaders to receive five to seven client insight reports per day, up from one to three per week with the legacy CRM system. With up-to-the-hour visibility into client questions, needs, and issues, leaders can take immediate action instead of learning about them after the fact during an escalation.

Visibility into every client case reveals trends and opportunities

Using built-in AI tools, employees can quickly search client emails by keyword, concern, date, and other relevant information to produce reports that can influence strategy or point out areas of improvement. For example, if multiple employees of a client institution ask the same question in a month, it might reveal the need to schedule training or fill a gap in documentation.

Employees can do more with less, painlessly

With dramatic improvements in case response and resolution times and the elimination of costly maintenance contracts for on-premises solutions, Northern Trust staff becomes more efficient as the business continues to grow.

“With Dynamics 365, we’ve been able to optimize processes and significantly reduce bulk email noise," said Otikor-Miller. "For example, one team has reduced its email-to-case volume by 67%, and another team is able to respond to clients in one third of the time it took on the legacy system.”

Banking on a continuous, successful partnership

A company’s digital transformation is a journey, not a sprint. Northern Trust is diligently and creatively moving its business processes forward to better serve its clients, today and in the future, and Microsoft looks forward to supporting this journey. As Otikor-Miller says, “Microsoft is more than our vendor. We’re a partnership now.”