Do banks need a CRM software?
At first glance, this seems like an absurd question.
Banks are, after all, traditionally associated with a soothing ambience, carpeted floors, and the sounds of typing and clicking of pens.
But the material facilities at a bank are only secondary to the warm smiles of greeting from a trusted bank executive.
Which makes the presence of a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) software all the more important!
In this blog, let’s dive into what a CRM software is, how does a banking CRM solution mitigate operational and service challenges in the retail and commercial banking sectors, and why Salesforce Financial Services Cloud has been touted as the best CRM system for banks.
What is CRM in Banking?
Let’s define a CRM first.
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is a strategy that companies use to manage interactions and enhance relationships with customers and prospects. A CRM software, therefore, enables an organisation to streamline marketing and administrative processes, build customer relationships, increase sales, and improve the speed of service.
In a highly regulated industry such as banking, a CRM system enables banking executives to gain full visibility into their customers’ journey, allowing them to personalise their interactions and unearth opportunities for cross-selling or upselling.
In fact, a mature CRM solution (such as Salesforce), offers CRM features dedicated to the financial sector. Salesforce Financial Services Cloud enables bank executives to gain a unified view of their clients and derive insights from their data—thus equipping them to deliver faster service and quicker resolutions.
What is the Need for a Banking CRM Software?
An industry as highly regulated as banking is subject to severe competition from small-scale lending companies on the one hand and rising regulatory requirements on the other. Banks are expected to ride the wave of digital transformation by customers, who demand faster service and quicker resolutions on par with other industries.
Moreover, automating banking administrative tasks is not enough. With the rise of AI, clients now expect their banking partners to have access to account data at their fingertips and provide chatbots that answer their queries instantly.
Even when it comes to internal operations, banking employees are nowadays demanding that technology be used in creating marketing campaigns and in deriving insights around client preferences.
A banking CRM solution can easily help retail and commercial banking firms standardise and consolidate their prospect and customer information, create workflows for marketing, sales, and customer relationship management teams, and make informed decisions with trustworthy and unified data.
Who In a Bank Needs a Banking CRM Solution?
Since a banking CRM solution creates an ecosystem that provides faster and highly efficient banking services, the software will be relevant to:
- CXOs: Since a Chief Experience Officer is primarily responsible for fostering brand loyalty and ensuring a customer-centric approach to banking operations, a banking CRM software can help a CXO ensure that customer needs are at the forefront of their banking services.
- IT Managers: The CTO and his team can rely on a secure, cloud-based CRM to easily integrate disparate applications, ensure scalability, and maintain uniform and updated data in the system.
- Customer Service Managers: A banking CRM solution empowers customer-facing banking executives to deliver exceptional service at every touchpoint with the help of a centralised dashboard that provides access to the client’s financial portfolio and investment history.
- Sales and Marketing Managers: While a banking CRM solution helps marketing executives gain a holistic view of their leads and nurture them effectively, sales representatives can use the software to customise their sales strategies and provide targeted product recommendations.
What Banking CRM Solutions Does Salesforce Offer?
As a CRM solutions provider that focuses on providing a unique, satisfying, and wholesome customer experience, Salesforce is the natural choice for companies wishing to build robust sales, marketing, and customer retention strategies.
Salesforce Financial Services Cloud, in particular, caters to the unique requirements of financial services providers, such as banks, insurance companies, and wealth management firms, by providing an integrated customer relationship management platform with productivity and engagement features.
The CRM provides prebuilt applications with user experiences, automation, and integration that have been designed based on industry best practices. This helps you reduce development costs and negates the need for extensive customisation.
And, with its recent foray into AI, Salesforce’s CRM platform can help you become more predictive about your customers, anticipate newer opportunities, and exceed customer needs.
Find out how Corptec can help you optimize your sales efforts and propel your banking operations to new heights! Reach out to our certified Salesforce specialists for a free Salesforce Health Check today!
Let’s now look at how Salesforce’s powerful suite of tools can help transform both retail and commercial banking services.
Banking CRM Solutions: How Salesforce Can Benefit Retail and Commercial Banking Operations
The retail banking sector is known for offering financial services to individuals and small-medium enterprises (SMEs). The commercial banking sector, on the other hand, offers banking services to businesses, institutions, and governments. Both sectors equally require a mature banking CRM software to increase client engagement and improve their sales pipeline.
Let’s explore the top 9 ways in which your banking operations can benefit from Salesforce Financial Services Cloud.
1. Unified and Secure Customer Data
Data in the banking sector is growing at an exponential rate. In fact, a 2024 Statista report states that the number of active online banking users around the world is set to soar significantly in the coming years. This is a critical period in which banks should not put off collecting, organising, and consolidating their vast volumes of financial and client data.
Salesforce Financial Services Cloud can help you here. This banking CRM platform enables you to create a single, holistic view of your customer data across all touchpoints—branch visits, online interactions, telephonic conversations, and mobile app activities. Not only does the CRM ensure that your data is secure and consolidated, it offers you options to streamline data management across multiple departments.
This 360° view of customer data also equips you with a deep understanding of your buyer’s financial goals, needs, and preferences, enabling you to tailor your product offerings accordingly.
2. Centralised Account Management
Salesforce Financial Services Cloud helps retail and commercial banking executives optimise banking relationships and elevate client communication with strategic account management. This banking CRM system offers you a centralised platform to help you manage interactions with your clients—including account activities, loan applications, and service requests.
Salesforce Financial Services Cloud also provides your staff with case document management features as well as an internal customer database to help them address customer inquiries, quickly and accurately. This banking CRM facilitates seamless management of customer consents, underwriting, and approval processes to accelerate product onboarding.
With Salesforce, banking professionals can now have a complete and updated history of their client’s relationship with the bank—readily accessible—at any time!
3. Personalised Customer Journey
A survey that came out in 2020 studied the customer satisfaction ratings of banks in Australia, in which Heritage Bank, ING, and Bendigo came out on top, followed closely by the Big Four—ANZ, Commonwealth, Westpac, and NAB. These banks are, of course, reputed for their high standards of customer service.
Interestingly, the same survey also found that younger generations preferred mobile banking services over in-house banking, indicating a massive shift in how customers today like to be serviced.
Investing in an intelligent banking CRM like Salesforce can help both commercial and retail banks survive and adapt to such changes while personalising their customer journey. Salesforce Financial Services Cloud enables banks to leverage a multichannel approach that utilises web, e-mail, phone, and SMS services to interact with customers across their preferred platforms.
Additionally, with integrated AI, Salesforce Financial Services Cloud can help you utilise chatbots for on-site self-service Q&A, leverage customer surveys to boost satisfaction scores, and implement improvements based on direct feedback.
The combination of AI and data analytics (Salesforce Einstein Analytics or Tableau CRM) also helps banking executives leverage customer insights to tailor product recommendations, marketing campaigns, and service interactions, according to their client’s needs. (For example, you can provide loan options specifically designed for your client’s small business aspirations or offer personalised investment strategies aligned with their risk tolerance.) This helps in significantly elevating client satisfaction scores.
4. Improved Sales Efficiency
Apart from offering robust CRM features, Salesforce Financial Services Cloud is a complete sales platform that enables banks to engage buyers effectively, improve seller productivity, and close deals faster. (Imagine, for example, a loan officer receiving real-time alerts when a customer’s financial profile aligns perfectly with a new mortgage product!)
With Salesforce, you can easily boost your bank’s sales and revenue figures through strategic sales pipeline management. The CRM’s intelligent features help you deliver targeted cross-sell and up-sell recommendations, enhancing customer value and boosting revenue opportunities.
Moreover, Salesforce Financial Services Cloud empowers your sales reps to identify and prioritise high-value prospects, thus ensuring that they never miss a sales opportunity.
5. Streamlined Marketing Operations
Salesforce Financial Services Cloud also enables banks to enhance client engagement and optimise their marketing strategies through targeted automation and data-driven customer interactions.
This banking CRM solution automates personalised marketing campaigns for different business lines and products to ensure tailored customer engagement. It helps enhance marketing activities by streamlining the lead nurturing process. This is done with automated, customised onboarding sequences that help in converting leads into loyal customers efficiently.
Salesforce also helps you centralise and manage prospect and client email communication, and equips marketing teams with integrated tools to manage leads, referrals, and opportunities. This ensures efficient tracking and nurturing of potential and existing customers.
6. Automated Retail and Commercial Operations
Thanks to their diverse product and client portfolio, both retail and commercial sector banks are indispensable for a healthy, thriving economy. And, since the advent of ATMs and online modes of banking in the 1970s, automation has been playing an increasingly important role in the smooth functioning of banks.
An intelligent banking CRM solution like Salesforce can help banks get rid of lengthy, cumbersome banking processes by automating tasks and workflows. It offers integrated management solutions and optimised lending processes to help streamline operations and enhance efficiency across bank branches.
Salesforce Financial Services Cloud also enables faster client acquisition and a smoother onboarding experience for your new business partners with automation. The CRM helps you implement automation in the DAO (Deposit Account Opening) application process, reducing time and increasing accuracy in document handling and processing.
Additionally, the CRM also ensures operational and branch efficiency by allowing bank branch managers and administrators to monitor the performance and productivity of branches, employees, and customer segments efficiently.
7. Better Team Collaboration
Another area in which a seasoned banking CRM solution like Salesforce benefits banks is by elevating both customer and employee experiences in parallel.
The CRM helps break down silos between teams and departments and facilitates seamless collaboration between relationship managers, loan officers, and other stakeholders—thereby ensuring that clients receive a connected and consistent banking experience.
(Let’s say, for example, that a customer requested the relationship manager for a specific product or discount over a phone call, which was approved. When this client visits the bank, the banking executive will be ready with the necessary forms—as he would already have all the details updated in real-time in the Salesforce CRM.)
Salesforce Financial Services Cloud also helps you equip your customer service representatives with the information they need to deliver exceptional service at every interaction. With real-time access to customer data, they can now proactively address issues, recommend relevant products, and personalise interactions—all while keeping other departments updated about client transactions and issues in real-time. This eventually helps in providing a holistic experience to the customer at every touch point.
8. Actionable Data Analytics
Salesforce’s CRM Analytics helps banks leverage visual insights and AI-powered predictions to examine customers’ transaction patterns. This not only provides a basis for tailored financial product offerings and proactive advice but also allows banks to develop targeted financial solutions and act as a strategic advisor.
Salesforce’s CRM Analytics, therefore, gives you a comprehensive understanding of your clients’ financial health, operational needs, and growth ambitions, fostering trust and deeper client relationships.
Moreover, with Salesforce Financial Services Cloud, it becomes easy for bank IT managers to connect the CRM with their core banking systems. Such seamless integration offers a comprehensive and holistic view of their customers—facilitating enhanced analytics, risk identification for compliance, and effective policy documentation.
By leveraging powerful analytics, CXOs and CSOs can easily gain insights into client behaviour, identify upselling opportunities, and optimise their product offerings for maximum client benefit.
9. Enhanced Regulatory Compliance
One of the reasons leading banks in the world choose to go with Salesforce Financial Services Cloud is because it prioritises security with industry-leading compliance standards and robust data protection measures.
Salesforce’s CRM for banks has been designed for today’s pro-cloud customers. It, therefore, maintains a comprehensive set of compliance certifications and attestations to validate customer trust.
Moreover, to enhance regulatory compliance in the Salesforce ecosystem, the CRM has been combined with Salesforce Shield— a trio of security tools that helps you build extra levels of trust, compliance, and governance right into your business-critical apps. It features Einstein Data Detect which allows you to scan your applications for sensitive data and then take steps to protect it.
Since banks are required to be transparent in the way they manage their clients’ investments, Salesforce CRM can support bank managers with visibility into interactions between clients, advisors, agents, and teams, thus helping them prepare for internal audits.
So, Is Salesforce Financial Services Cloud the Best Choice for Your Banking Processes Too?
As the world’s largest global provider of CRM services, Salesforce has built up quite a reputation since it was founded in 1999. It has single-handedly revolutionised the customer relationship management (CRM) industry with the introduction of its cloud-based data management solutions and software-as-a-service (SaaS) subscription model.
Needless to say, for an industry as highly regulated and exclusive as banking, Salesforce is the way to go.
With this reputed banking CRM solution, banking professionals can:
- Enhance banking services by equipping their team with a comprehensive view of customer data and insights across the enterprise
- Improve efficiency and reduce risk by reusing business processes across channels
- Automate data collection, document generation, and workflows
- Witness an increase in both client satisfaction as well as revenue
Additionally, banking executives can use Salesforce Financial Services Cloud to connect financial, transactional, and CRM data using a range of prebuilt-to-custom accelerators that scale for high volume. The CRM delivers speed to value and continuous, relevant innovation so that banks can save time and money on customisations while accelerating business growth.
Leverage Salesforce Banking CRM Solutions with Corptec Technology Partners
If you would like to build a custom CRM system for your retail or commercial banking operations, Corptec Technology Partners can guide and support you in leveraging Salesforce Financial Services Cloud for your unique business needs.
As a trusted Salesforce consulting partner since 2019, Corptec Technology Partners has designed customer journeys for organisations across Australia by helping them maximise the potential of this leading CRM platform. We specialise in developing CRM solutions tailored to enhance data management and customer relations in the banking industry. We also offer full-cycle implementation of Sales, Service, and Marketing Clouds, and support custom Salesforce integrations with any ERP or third-party applications.
Let Corptec Technology Partners help you choose a banking CRM product that’s right for you by evaluating the individual needs of your business. Whether you’re looking to personalise customer engagements, scale service interactions, or streamline your onboarding experience, Salesforce Financial Services Cloud has a variety of editions you can customise to your business needs.
Interested in learning how Corptec can help you establish winning relationships with your banking clients?
