Benefits of CRM One of the unique challenges of business banking in a digital world is meeting customer expectations. You can’t just have a great checking account or lending terms, as you can with most retail customers. You must offer sound financial advice.
And in the information age, that means having in-depth knowledge of each customer’s industry, taking a tailored approach, and doing it all faster than ever before. Your corporate customers want goal-based planning, proactive insights, personalized outreach, and more.
As fintechs create seamless, effortless, personalized experiences for customers, including in the banking space, business banks should follow suit or risk falling behind in the competitive landscape.
What does CRM stand for in banking?
Just as in other industries like retail or business, in banking, CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management. A Customer Relationship Management solution in banking helps banks manage customers and better understand their needs in order to provide the right solutions, quickly. There are many specific benefits of CRM in banking.
What are the benefits of CRM in banking?
1. Boosted Sales
2 . Increased Lead Conversion
3. Personalized Customer Journeys
4. Increased Productivity
5. More Efficient Communication
6. Inter-Department Data Tracking
7. Better Service
8. Improved Customer Experience
9. Increased Customer Loyalty
Boosted Sales
On average, business banks loan out 15 times more money than consumer lenders. The stakes are high if you want to earn those big business accounts, and you need a great CRM to launch you ahead of the competition.
Identify, nurture, and convert leads into deals before the other guys even know what hit them.
Increased Lead Conversion
How many times have you called on a prospect to offer them a new service, only to find their needs have already been handled by someone else—from your own bank? Perhaps a real estate customer needs to find and lease additional equipment when they expand their manufacturing efforts in a newly-purchased building.
If your bank offers both services, it makes sense to go after that new opportunity, right? Especially when you know that your probability of selling an additional product or service to a customer increases with every successful sale under your mutual belt. The percentages prove it: You’ll convert five to 20 percent for new customers versus 60 to 70 percent for existing customers.
Implementing CRM in banking enables deeper and more customized customer interactions.
With CRM banking technology, each department can access the same information across all customer profiles, while also setting up individual triggers for offering additional services.
Employees can look up rich customer profiles compiled from marketing, sales, and service data to identify new opportunities to convert leads.
They won’t have to start from scratch every time an interdepartmental lead comes through the funnel, so they’ll create a seamless and personalized experience for the customer and a streamlined conversion process for you.
Personalized Customer Journeys
Customer retention is critical, but in order to keep your bank growing, you also need a constant flow of new customers. How do you find them? What’s the best way to reach out to them? How can you improve your marketing? A CRM for financial services can help you answer all of these questions so you can provide your institution with a steady stream of new and ready leads.
While drawing in loads of customers is great, keeping track of and following up with each individual customer can overload your staff. So how do you create targeted, successful ad campaigns without knowing who your customers are and what they want? Well… you can’t. You need as much data as possible, but without proper organization, you won’t be able to see the trends.
A great banking CRM allows you to create reports and graphic representations of key data points and trends, which makes it easy to share with your team, drive your marketing strategy, and keep your customers happy all the while.
You can see everything you need to know about each customer with Salesforce Marketing Cloud. Wondering how many leads can you trace back to last month’s social media campaign? Which of your web pages gets the most attention? Who’s talking about you and what are they saying? It’s all there.
A bank’s CRM solution can help keep track of customer behaviors and predict needs, and then automatically send out suggestions for how the bank can fulfill those needs with a tailored product offering.
Increased Productivity(Benefits of crm)
Nearly eight in 10 (79 percent) of all marketing leads are never converted to sales. Incredible, right? Let’s say you have a full sales team. Would you hire an additional banker if, on average, he single-handedly increased loan sales by 29 percent and offered a return of 5.6 times his salary in revenue? It’s a no brainer.
What if you could get these results with technology solutions instead of a new hire? You can, because that’s exactly what a CRM for financial services can do for your bank. CRMs help cut costs by minimizing repetitive administrative tasks, streamlining proposals, and keeping your sales team in the loop with just a few clicks. With the right technology, bankers are capable of handling more accounts in less time.
More Efficient Communication
Social media. Email marketing. Website traffic. Search engines. Marketing has come a long way from newspaper ads and billboards. Going digital has had its benefits, such as enabling banks to reach more businesses with lower advertising costs. This dependence on technology also presents its own challenges.(benefits of Crm).
Conversations about your brand are now happening more quickly and publicly than ever, and one angry customer can muddy your brand’s reputation with just a few keystrokes. Since customers are twice as likely to talk about their bad experiences than good ones, you could be looking at a PR nightmare at any moment if you don’t find solutions.
A CRM can help you monitor the web for conversations about your brands and products. It can also make it easier for you to respond quickly in a way that puts out the fire instead of stoking the flames.
Inter-Department Data Tracking
Today, marketing is a data-driven field. But likes, clicks, and visits aren’t the only data points that can help improve your marketing. You need to know how many of those behaviors lead to successful sales.
When potential clients speak to your bankers, what are their top concerns, and can they be addressed in your marketing to better prime businesses for the sale? What parts of the loan process give customers problems or prevent them from becoming raving fans of your bank?
The right CRM can track data from several departments, so a call to customer service or a lost account becomes an opportunity to prepare potential customers to love banking with you—before they ever speak to a banker.
Better Service(Benefits of crm)
With the right banking technology, you may be able to offer services such as mobile check deposits, fraud alerts, paperless statements, customer service chat, and more. You may already offer many of these digital services. Imagine what you could do if you paired them with a great CRM that could keep track of all of your customer interactions.
Improved Customer Experience
With 300 different products and thousands of branches across the country, the head of a leading US bank’s Wholesale Service Group calls the financial institution a “relationship bank.” He cites the use of Salesforce as key to maintaining customer satisfaction. Since many Wells Fargo customers use dozens of Wells Fargo products, they often need help across many departments and don’t know who to call with specific questions.
Even if your bank has only a few dozen distinct products, your customer service depends on answering questions and solving problems quickly, without handing the customer off to department after department. With a good banking CRM, you can easily keep all departments on the same page and quickly provide each customer with solutions.
Increased Customer Loyalty
What’s the true test of how much you value your customers? Customer retention through customer service.
Although well-timed sales and offering products based on customer needs are important, 76 percent of consumers say customer service is a primary factor in how they value a brand. Great service is the part of the sales funnel that keeps your customers coming back for more.
How can a CRM help? By giving you access to rich customer profiles with just a few clicks. Your customers have businesses to run, so asking them to repeat their issue or customer history each time they speak to a new representative stretches their patience and wastes your time and theirs.
Instead, you can instantly pull up every service ticket, purchase, and data point at the precise moment customers need help so you can swoop in to save the day. When you use a CRM solution to stay on top of customer service tickets and personalize your response, you can turn issues into opportunities for increasing loyalty and satisfaction.
Conclusion
CRM solutions are no longer limited to just the retail or business verticals; rather, they are now essential for any entity that offers goods or services. When it comes down to it, business banks share an important challenge with their own customers: Banking is now a customer-driven world.
Banks that understand and serve the individual needs of their customers best will succeed, while those who still use sticky notes to keep track of accounts will lose market share and fade away. Adopting a banking CRM is critical to serving your customers at every point in the sales funnel, so don’t get left behind.
