CRM for Finance

Picture this scenario. You purchase a clothing item from an ecommerce site. The product arrives in three days. The size doesn’t fit, so you want to return it. A typical process you follow is to initiate a return on the ecommerce website. And on most ecommerce websites, you can track the pick-up status from the time your request is approved until the moment the package is picked up.

Think about a similar scenario in a financial institution, say, a bank. You have a query about extending the credit limit for your credit card. You either call the toll free number, reach out to your personal banker, or go to the bank. But how is the quality of customer experience with a bank, as compared with that on an ecommerce site?

Customers today are comparing the quality of support they receive from other businesses with the quality of support they receive from banks. As a result, customer experience has become imminent for financial institutions across the world.

Here are some statistics—from the Forrester Banking Experience Report—that bring out the impact of positive customer experience on banking customers. Around 77% of the 110,000 customers surveyed indicated that they will stay with the financial institution if they feel valued. Furthermore, 89% of the customers indicated that they will be willing to advocate the institution if they feel respected.

Great customer experience in financial institutions is now about how much they know their customers, and how well they are able to customize their offerings, as opposed to how much they are able to sell what they have. For example, a digital-only bank in New Zealand, instead of offering a free checking account or savings account to woo a customer, allows its customers to create buckets - like travel, rent, and so on - into which they can slot their money. That way, when they have a wishlist or a financial goal, they know how far they are from it. What the bank did here was to help their customers improve their financial situation, rather than merely selling a product to them.

What more does good customer experience comprise?

Customer experience largely boils down to three key components:

How banks handle customer service issues has a direct impact on its overall CX Index Score
Feeling appreciated, valued, and respected take precedence and these are tactics financial institutions can adopt to build a loyal customer base
Bankers need to move beyond just communicating factual information, to helping customers identify ways to improve their financial situation

So, how can financial institutions create an above par customer experience across multiple touchpoints? By signing up for a CRM for Finance.

Why do you need a specialized CRM for Finance?

Well, the reasons are many. Whether you run a wealth management firm, commercial bank, corporate bank, or an investment bank, a CRM for Finance ensures that your employees across sales, marketing, and support teams are able to access customer data and customer activity history seamlessly across departments. This is the first step to enhancing customer experience. Of course, a CRM software for Finance also ensures that you don’t have to juggle between multiple tools to manage customer journey and customer data. The CRM offers everything finance teams need on one single platform.

Effectively manage lead data

Whether you discover your leads through field sales, telesales, direct sales, or referral, you can add your leads into the CRM in multiple ways: by manually adding a lead, importing leads through excel sheets, or creating web forms on your website.

In fact, a CRM for Finance software also allows you to convert your sales emails into leads, or add leads after making a phone call within the CRM. Here’s more good news:. When it comes to making phone calls within the CRM, you can integrate your own banking VoIP solution, or choose from a host of integrations that an ideal CRM for Finance software comes with.

Once your leads get added into the CRM software, you get a 360-degree view of the lead profile, including a chronological timeline of activities or engagements you’ve had with them, over email, phone, through sales activities, or such.

Lastly, your institution might be getting a multitude of leads across product or segment verticals. How do you ensure that not everybody across the organization has access to data which may not be relevant to them? A CRM for Finance software enables you to create custom roles, where you can set access level controls for what data each user can access and edit within the CRM.

Track customer journey across touchpoints

Whether it is loans, deposits, or investments, a CRM for Finance software enables you to track your customer journey across stages, ensuring that you get a holistic view of where each customer is across the pipeline, where there are bottlenecks, if any, and what strategies need to be adopted to accelerate the sanctioning or closure.

Additionally, a CRM software enables you to create multiple deals pipelines to track customer journey across products, across region, and so on.

Measure how your business is performing

Analyze deals by getting an insight into various metrics such as deal stages by product, total account value, loans by source, phone calls made in a month, in a quarter, approved loans by month, quarter or year, and more. While reports in a CRM for Finance enable you to measure your business and team performance from time to time, a dashboard enables you to compare reports such as loans sanctioned in the first quarter of the year compared to the sanctions in the same quarter the previous year, or deposits by source, compared to deposits by region, and such.

Accessing reports gives you regular insight into how your business is performing, and what steps need to be taken to fuel its growth.

Enhance cross-sell and upsell opportunities

Let’s say you’ve onboarded a new customer with a savings bank account. After a certain period, based on their transaction patterns and activity history, you might find them eligible for a personal loan, a credit card, or more. Your relationship manager or contact center representative can’t really keep track of each customer across time periods. Instead, you can simply set up a workflow to send an automated email to a customer, after a certain period, pitching a product from your suite.

Alternatively, you can even set up a reminder for your relationship manager or contact center representative to follow up with a customer on a cross-sell or upsell opportunity after a certain period. This ensures that you maximize your opportunity to cross-sell or upsell, while also communicating contextually.

Nurture your customers

A good CRM for Finance software enables you to reach out to hundreds of customers with customized, personalized campaigns and emails, which can be your gateway to establishing a good rapport with them, and even creating a loyalty towards your brand. Be it to wish them for their birthdays or anniversaries, or to send them relevant product or service emails, personalizing can go a long way in making your customers feel that you really care about their interests and needs, rather than just focussing on selling your product to reach your targets.

Ensure quick turnarounds

Like we said earlier, creating a great customer experience is about sustaining that quality across touchpoints within your company. Customers come back with multiple queries and requests – they need a new credit card, they need to generate a new pin, they want to check on an unusual transaction, and so on. In such circumstances, integrating your CRM for Finance software with a support software will not only ensure that you have context about the customer’s past interactions with your company to make your response more relevant, but also ensure that you are able to prioritize customer issues and address them more efficiently.