Redefining Customer Service in the Banking World with the Latest CRM Systems

The banking sector is in the midst of a dramatic transformation; the rapid growth of digital-first engagements coupled with the growing trend of remote working and changing preferences of the 21st-century client has heralded the beginning of a new customer service era profoundly impacting financial institutions in many ways.

The transformation is only gaining speed with each passing day, as various factors such as customer behavior, dynamics of the sector, requirements of the workforce and ever-evolving technology are empowering banking organizations to come up with new strategies to delight their customers.

Despite several groundbreaking advances in technology, many clients still value the empathy provided by a human service rep. At the same time, they prefer to use various self-service tools such as a user-friendly app on their smartphones or converse with smart chatbots that can answer targeted questions with high efficacy. A major advantage of self-service tools is they help drive efficiency and cost savings by reducing the requirement of human agents significantly.

No matter how he connects with a banking business, the new-age customer expects hassle-free, fully-connected experiences across all channels and touchpoints. Today, let’s examine how the growing use of technology is impacting organizations in the banking and financial services sectors and enabling them to deliver better services to their clientele. But first, let’s have a look at the unique problems and opportunities faced by banks and other financial institutions in going digital to provide seamless, high-quality services to customers.

What Are the Key Challenges Faced By Banking Firms in Using Digital Tools?

Banks have been much slower than organizations in other sectors in embracing digital technologies to provide customer service due to various reasons such as legacy systems and frameworks, regulatory hurdles, business lines that are (and work) independent of each other and data safety needs. These problems prevent smooth integration of information across the entire organization. A senior executive remarked that a typical banking firm has about 10 to 15 business lines; each of these brings its own procedures, tools and data.

But owing to rapidly-evolving customer preferences and intense competition from fintech companies, many banks are compelled to adopt novel digital customer service tools. As millennial clients expect banking organizations to have a comprehensive view of their relationships, the lenders are forced to connect disparate processes and data belonging to different business lines. The connections go a long way in enabling banks to deliver more personalized experiences and solutions, facilitating higher levels of productivity and customer satisfaction.

A robust Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platform enables banks to integrate data collected from diverse sources and leverage the data to provide solutions fully tailored to meet the specific financial needs of each of their customers. Let’s now delve deeper into the benefits of using CRM systems.

How Does a CRM System Help Banks Deliver Excellent Services to Customers?

Facilitates Delivery of Smooth Customer Service

Many clients prefer to bank with firms that provide efficient and flexible self-service options; in fact, a study by Harvard Business Review shows 81% of customers attempt self-service before calling for support. Self-service allows your clients to get the right answers to their questions even after your working hours and without having to repeat their queries multiple times and waiting for the needed information. It goes a long way in fulfilling the expectations of your clients and enhances the efficiency of your service function in a big way.

Still, there are instances when your clients wish to connect with you at a branch or interact with human agents. The customers expect you to make your digital tools as intuitive as human reps to deliver the right information as the digital tools. Many clients are frustrated at the inability of banks to provide a big picture of their relationship; they often feel they are talking to separate departments of a bank and not the bank itself.

Today, many banking organizations are adopting a ‘hybrid customer service approach’, which allows clients to utilize self-service tools to get the service they want rapidly and find out how new products and services can meet their needs. At the same time, the approach always provides an option for customers to seek support from human agents. Irrespective of whether it is a human or a digital agent, the customer expects his request to be properly attended to. A powerful CRM system helps your banking organization make the best use of real-time data to empower all your (human and digital) customer service resources to delight clients.

Enhancing Productivity and Customer Engagement

While it is true many banking and financial institutions are continuing to redefine their physical presence, ensuring a fully-connected client story and delivering top-notch services are becoming even more important. Many customers mostly interact with their banks using their mobile devices but it is still essential to offer connected experiences across all channels.

Banks can save significant amounts of time through automation of the resolution of commonly-asked queries, and thereby, facilitate better in-person interaction while maximizing productivity. A study by Salesforce showed 78% of agents opine automation of mundane tasks enables them to focus on resolving more complex client issues. It is vital to deliver experiences of consistently high quality across all departments, channels and touchpoints. The latest advances in technology have paved the way for increased organizational efficiency, more effective utilization of human resources and timely, strategic business insights.

The need for high levels of efficiency has acquired a whole new context in the backdrop of many service personnel working remotely or in a geographically-dispersed setting. Novel CRM systems help decentralized customer support organizations function very effeciently by enabling effective, real-time sharing and access to client data in a highly secure manner.

Integrating Processes and People

We should remember transformative customer service goes together with transformative technology. Well-designed processes and technological tools play a key role in enabling effective automation and good data visibility and implement enhancements whose impact can be felt throughout your organization.

For instance, autonomous finance leverages state-of-the-art Artificial Intelligence (AI) and automation capabilities to utilize information in CRM databases to provide ultra-personalized experiences to customers of financial services firms. However, companies need to modify their approach to business operations, and this includes digitization and automation of customer support activities earlier performed by manual reps.

This enables a cycle of benefits where high-quality client data begets robust company data, enabling the delivery of excellent support to each customer journey at scale. In the meantime, data that can be rapidly obtained and utilized on the ‘frontline’ facilitates better decision-making, product creation, risk mitigation and growth strategies.

As you can see, using a robust CRM platform empowers your bank to unleash the power of data and automation to delight your clientele. At Solunus, we help you harness the immense potential of Salesforce, the most widely used CRM system in the world to provide excellent services to your customers. Our team of Salesforce veterans has enabled several banking and other financial institutions of all sizes to make the best use of Salesforce to build strong relationships with their customers and accelerate growth.

Hope you liked this post. How do you use CRM systems to deliver top-notch customer service? We’d love to know.

About Solunus

Solunus is a leading Salesforce consulting company, based in Dallas, TX, USA. Our proven ‘needs-first’ approach coupled with our unrivaled expertise of the Salesforce platform enables us to provide the perfect solution to help you deliver delightful services to customers and achieve rapid growth.