Top 8 Benefits of CRM for Banking

Top 8 Benefits of CRM for Banking

Meeting customer expectations is a major challenge that banks face in the digital age. Today’s banks are no longer confined to mere lending and maintaining accounts like other business organizations.

In an era where customers can get the desired information with just a few clicks, banking firms need to provide sound financial advice that helps customers meet their financial goals.

To do this, banks need to come up with perfectly-tailored solutions to meet the unique needs of each customer. With growing numbers of fintech companies providing highly personalized experiences to customers, banks need to catch up to stay ahead of the competition. This is possible by using a powerful Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system. Today, we will examine how a CRM system can help you enhance the efficiency of your bank and make it more customer-centric, in detail.

How Can a CRM System Make Your Bank the One that Customers Appreciate and Value?

A good CRM system can help banks become customer-focused in the following ways.

Establish a Customer-centric, Needs-Based Model CRM systems help banks communicate with customers on diverse channels to address the latter’s needs and align financial products and services to their goals. By using a robust CRM system your bank can make its business customer-friendly, understand the needs of its clients better and ensure high levels of engagement throughout the customer lifecycle.

Personalize Customer Service at Scale Personalization is not a thing of the future anymore. A powerful CRM system will help banks track customer data across various departments in the bank, including loan disbursal and customer service teams to get a 360-degree view of each customer. With this information at hand, you can facilitate tailored customer experiences that help exceed client expectations and ingrain trust in your bank for a lifetime.

Deliver Digital-First Engagements Digital-first banks are the ones that are bound to grow; these organizations represent the future of banking. With digital channels being widely used to perform financial transactions, banks need to

deliver digital-first experiences to customers. A good CRM system can help you embark on your digital transformation journey.

Enhance the Efficacy of Marketing Efforts A constant challenge that marketers struggle with is creating valuable reports that enable seamless use of customer data. The right CRM platform helps marketers in the banking sector create reports highlighting customer engagement channels, data points, purchase trends, and other key information effortlessly. With this information, marketing teams can explore new customer engagement opportunities and facilitate personalized customer journeys.

Make Your Banking Operations More Efficient CRM systems can make your banking business highly efficient, by helping you automate mundane administrative tasks, keep all the teams on the same page by providing the latest customer information and streamline customer interactions across various touchpoints, with just a few clicks.

It can help you get a glimpse into customers’ needs, preferences, financial goals and relationships at any given time, on any device, thus increasing the overall visibility.

Let us now look at 8 key benefits of using a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) for your bank.

8 Major Advantages of Using CRM Systems in the Banking Sector 1. Ability to Use Data to Grow Revenues While customer retention is integral to the development of your business, you need a constant and consistent flow of new customers as well to keep your company growing. Some of the questions you need to answer as a banking institution are: • • • •

How can you find new customers?

What is the best channel to reach out to them?

How can you boost your marketing efforts for better market visibility?

What steps can you take to outperform your competitors?

The answer -- a good CRM tool fully customized for your banking institution. The CRM tool can help you set up a process to ensure a continuous flow of new customers.

Another challenge that growing banks face is tracking, monitoring and following up on the activities of each customer; at times, this can prove to be overwhelming for the banks’ staff. Bankers also need to remember that launching ad campaigns without knowing the needs of the intended audience yields no results. A robust CRM tool can help you address these challenges. From creating graphical representations of trends and data points to reports, a robust CRM system can help you

drive all your marketing efforts and share the next steps with your team easily. Thus, it makes collaboration easy and eventually makes your customers happy.

A good CRM system also helps you identify web pages that receive more traction, check how many leads are generated from your social media campaigns, learn what your customers and prospects are talking about your bank and get comprehensive information about customers' behaviors, preferences and needs.

2. Up-selling/Cross-selling of High Efficacy Imagine you’ve zeroed-in on a prospect for one of your banking products and closed the deal. You then identify that he might be needing a more high-end product or a complementary service from your bank to cover his other business needs. But, when you call them, you find out to your surprise that someone else from your bank has offered them that service.

If your banking institution offers these additional services, doesn’t it make sense for you to pitch them with your clients, especially when you know the probability of upselling or cross-selling a product to the customer is high. Various studies suggest that the probability of selling a product or service to an existing customer is 60% to 70% compared to the conversion rate for new customers which stands at 5% to 20%.

3. Personalization of Customer Interactions Having a 360-degree view of each customer can truly be a game-changer for your banking business.

By getting the picture of the customer, you can come up with banking services perfectly tailored to specific needs of your customers easily.

4. Productivity is Enhanced Considerably Do you know that over 79 percent of marketing leads are not converted into sales which is almost every eight in ten leads? Would you hire a banking professional if he can improve loan sales by almost 30 percent and brings in about 5.6 times the revenue of his annual salary single-handedly?

You definitely would, wouldn’t you?

But imagine if you can get all these results with a piece of technology rather than a new hire, wouldn’t it be a great opportunity for your business to earn more revenue? CRM systems can help you minimize monotonous administrative tasks, keep all your sales reps in the loop, streamline proposals and do much more. The CRM platform also allows banks to handle more customer accounts in a shorter timeframe.

5. Communication with Customers is Improved From billboards and newspapers to websites, social media marketing, email marketing and more, marketing has come a long way and undergone a massive transformation. Adopting digital channels has helped the banking industry to generate more business while cutting down on advertising costs significantly.

However, going digital has its challenges. With conversations happening online, an unsatisfied and angry customer can tarnish your brand image within no time. As customers are more accustomed to sharing negative experiences compared to positive ones, you need to be always alert to provide the best solution to turn around bad experiences into good ones.

A CRM system can help you track, monitor and respond to conversations that happen online concerning your brand and products. Thus, it makes easier to respond to customers quickly and maintain your brand image.

6. Capability to Tack Inter-Departmental Data Effectively Today, marketing is extensively driven by data. When it comes to analyzing which of your marketing efforts are helping you improve your business, user actions on social media such as likes, shares and comments are not the only metrics you need to consider. Instead, you need to go beyond and discover which customer behaviors are leading to more sales. Also, when customers and prospects speak to your team, understand their concerns and use them in your marketing strategy to boost your sales.

With the right CRM tool, you can track and record data from various departments easily. Whether it’s a call to your customer service team or a lost account, a CRM tool can help you use these data points to prepare for acquisition of new customers before they even get on a call with your reps.

7. Delivery of Better Customer Experiences Whether you’re a well-established bank with hundreds of products and services for customers or only a small organization with a few dozen financial products, you need to clarify the doubts of your customers and help them make the best investment decisions.

Rather than shoving the entire responsibility to your customer service department, using a CRM tool can take the banking experience of your customers to a whole new dimension. By doing so, you can help all departments of your bank to be on the same page and move at pace with each other while providing valuable solutions to customers.

8. Growth in Customer Loyalty Your customer retention numbers metric show how you value your customers and how likely they will continue to use your brand. This is why businesses should not only focus on developing valuable products and services but also concentrate on providing a better customer experience throughout the customer journey.

So how can a CRM tool help you improve customer loyalty? A good CRM system can give you access to relevant customer profiles with a few clicks. Customers tend to run to businesses whenever they encounter an issue with a particular product or service. However, making them repeat their query every time and putting them on hold for minutes annoys them, and wastes everyone’s time.

Instead, pulling out a service ticket, data points, and purchase information instantaneously can help your reps directly dive into the issue and resolve it in a timely manner. This can help you turn around major problems into opportunities that enable you to improve customer loyalty, and thereby, customer satisfaction.

As you can see, CRM systems help banks truly become their customers’ partners in achieving their financial goals. With the banking sector becoming customer-driven and data-driven, firms in this critical industry are relying on their CRM systems to delight their customers and reap rich dividends.

It is estimated that for every dollar spent on a CRM system, businesses can get an ROI of $8.71.

If you’re looking for an experienced IT company that can understand your unique needs effectively and come up with the ideal CRM solution to meet the needs, then you must partner with Solunus.

Our expert CRM professionals have helped various financial institutions meet their growth targets, in a highly efficient and cost-effective manner.

Hope you liked this post. How do you use CRM systems in your banking business? We’d love to know.

About Solunus Solunus is a dedicated Salesforce partner organization, headquartered in Dallas, Texas. Our unrelenting focus on comprehending the unique needs of our clients coupled with our unrivaled expertise of the Salesforce platform enables us to deliver the perfect solutions that create the best value for IT and business analytics firms.