WhyData Inc.’s business plan might best be summarized using an old adage: When there’s a gold rush, go into the shovel business.

The Pawtucket-based software and consulting services company is capitalizing on rapid consolidation of the banking industry by marketing a system that helps banks maintain or improve customer service while strategically integrating their operations during mergers and acquisitions.

“Consolidation of the banking market is a big play for us,” said Peter Murphy Gray, WhyData’s CEO, who co-founded the business in 2002 with Mary Curtis, the company’s chief administrative officer.

The company aims to be a pioneer of business process management, an emerging field that crunches data to figure out how sophisticated business operations involving complex interactions between human beings and technology can be designed to deliver superior customer service at the lowest cost.

WhyData’s Ability Suite is a Web-based operations research software system that surveys employees to analyze service quality and service risk. The company uses its online surveys to compile statistically valid results by asking employees at all levels of the business numerous questions about how they do their jobs and what problems affect their performance.

Based on the surveys, WhyData recommends typically three or four strategic modifications to a client’s operation to improve service, and continues to survey within the business during and after the process to make sure the changes are properly implemented.

“We believe the folks internal to your business know best where your issues are within the business,” said Keith Authelet, WhyData’s president and chief operating officer, who was formerly the chief information officer at Gilbane Inc.

“A lot of organizations will go out and poll their outside customers, believing that their customers will have a true perspective on how they’re doing as a business,” Authelet continued. “In fact, the person that’s in there every single day, that’s touching the customer – whether it’s a bank teller or someone who’s at a register – sees all the issues every day over and over again. So those are the folks that you truly want to talk to when you want to know how your business is doing.”

Seventy-five percent of the U.S. gross domestic product is based on service revenue, Gray said. Banks, insurance companies, brokerage firms, hotels, airlines and businesses in virtually all other service industries are increasingly seeking to improve their relationships with customers and provide them with new value-added services as a way to gain market share and drive revenue, Gray said.

“If you look at the financials of any big corporation, you split out the revenues and you’ll find that they’re increasingly, year over year, more dependent on these service revenue streams,” he said. “You’ve got to be able to measure it, and there are not very sophisticated measuring systems in place right now to do that.”

In particular, WhyData is targeting the top retail banks in the United States, pitching its system as a revolutionary tool that can forecast the specific impacts of a merger or acquisition before integration occurs, Curtis said.

The company recently helped Flint, Mich.-based Citizens Banking Corp. hedge its operational risk and prepare for merger integration as the bank acquired Owosso, Mich.-based Republic Bancorp Inc. The newly named Citizens Republic Bancorp completed the deal in April, becoming the 45th largest bank in the country, with $14 billion in assets.

WhyData helped Citizens Banking Corp. position itself for the merger by flagging snags affecting customer service that investment bankers conducting due diligence had overlooked, and recommending solutions that substantially increased the value of the deal, Gray said.

In particular, WhyData recommended that the bank educate key employees on the underwriting process and the reasons for a recent decline, communicate more effectively with line bankers about the deposit operations process, and more closely align its internal support procedures with the expectations of its line bankers.

The firm’s recommendations were successful enough when implemented that Cathy Nash, Citizens Banking Corp.’s executive vice president, last month presented the bank’s work with WhyData as a case study for improving service delivery at the Retail Branch Strategy Forum, an industry roundtable attended by 30 major banks.

This week, WhyData is announcing the appointment of Neal F. Finnegan, the former chairman of Citizens Bank of Massachusetts and former director of Citizens Financial Group, to its board of advisors.

Finnegan will help WhyData accelerate its current momentum in the financial services industry, Gray said. The company currently has six employees and expects $1 million in revenue this year, but plans to have 30 employees and revenue of $10 million by 2010.

“We have to figure out service business models as a country,” Gray said. “We have to get better at it, we have to get smarter at it, and we have to be driven by data, because there’s a ton of money to be made through essentially value-added services. As a business culture, we’re at the very beginning of the frontier.”