Salesforce - Empowering Banks to Fulfill the Expectations of Clientele

Over the last few months, various developments such as soaring inflation and increasing rates of interest have badly affected many customers of banks. These problems, coupled with high expectations from clients, are compelling banking firms to deliver hyper-personalized solutions to meet the unique credit needs of each of their customers.

Offering perfectly-tailored products to customers can go a long way in fulfilling their expectations and help banking businesses build stronger relationships with them.

The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic forced many customers to use digital channels to connect and transact with their banks. This made a fully-serving, user-friendly website or a mobile banking application a major expectation from consumers of banking products.

Several banks have embraced novel digital technologies and are coming up with innovative products to meet the needs of their customers. Despite these efforts, many clients are not happy with the services provided by their banks. In fact, a recently-conducted study by Salesforce revealed only 11% of clients believe their banks foresee their requirements, while just 18% think they get proper assistance from their banking agents.

The perceived inability of banks to meet the needs of their customers is driving many to avail attractive offers provided by fintech firms owned by IT giants such as Google, Amazon, Apple and so on; a survey showed more than 7 out of 10 new-age customers are more interested in financial products offered by technology bigwigs than the solutions offered by traditional banks.

How can banks deal with this situation? What does it take to satisfy clients effectively and retain them? One of the key aspects they must consider is using a powerful Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system. A good CRM platform helps banking firms make the best use of marketing and client information to understand the needs of their customers and come up with the right solutions that are completely aligned to the financial goals of each client.

One of the most widely-used CRM systems in the banking sector is Salesforce. Today, we’ll examine how the feature-rich platform empowers banking organizations to delight their customers and achieve rapid growth.

How Salesforce Helps Banks Deliver Top-notch Services to Their Customers

Salesforce comes with a wide array of capabilities that help you provide delightful services to your clients. The robust CRM system helps you:

Enable Your Banking Personnel to Get Deep, Actionable Insights in Real Time

A study by Salesforce revealed people in the banking sector said queries to the customer support team are visible to personnel in other departments nearly 79% of the time. While we all agree visibility is necessary, customer support reps and other client-facing personnel need to understand the context of a customer’s conversation and get the right insights. Unfortunately, in many cases, it is difficult to get the big picture of the client as his data resides in multiple, siloed systems.

You can resolve this problem very effectively using Salesforce. The robust CRM platform provides a 360-degree view of each customer by unifying data collected at multiple touchpoints. Consider the following scenario.

A customer called the help desk of a bank many times requesting an increase in his credit limit. A service rep who interacts with the customer not only knows the client made several calls but also has complete information about the calls and their outcomes readily displayed on the screen on his computer. Armed with this information, the rep immediately lists the steps the customer has to take to avail higher credit.

As you can see, the customer service rep is fully aware of the context of the customer’s interaction and is able to guide him instantly, without having to ask the client a dozen questions to know what the latter is talking about.

Salesforce not only helps your people use data to facilitate more engaging client conversations but also look ahead, enabling them to offer proactive advice. No wonder your customers will feel very satisfied.

Provide the Desired Information to Customers Seamlessly

Comprehending what your clients want and how they wish to connect with your banking institution can take time, as you need to thoroughly analyze information gathered from previous interactions.

Your bank can deliver excellent customer service only by ensuring your clients find the right answers to their queries without hassles. You can use Salesforce to facilitate effective self-service using a chatbot or equip your customer service reps with the right, timely information to provide hyper-personalized advice.

It is important you continually analyze your customer service process to identify ways to make it smoother. You must make the best use of your CRM data and cutting-edge technological paradigms such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) to deliver a fully-personalized experience. Proper use of the latest technology also helps you cut expenditures and increase productivity.

Many banks are utilizing Salesforce’s rich workflow automation capabilities to deliver solutions that are perfectly aligned with constantly-evolving customer expectations. The innovative CRM system helps you utilize real-time information to enable ultra-efficient transactions, delighting the new-age client.

Collect Feedback from Customers Effectively

A survey conducted by Salesforce in 2022 showed 72% of senior executives in financial organizations believed their clientele was very happy with their services, based on their own surveys to assess customer satisfaction. But those survey results could be misleading, as they were majorly influenced by a recent transaction.

When a team from Salesforce asked customers what they thought, many said banks had to do more to provide delightful services.

In a vast majority of cases, clients provide responses to survey questions on the basis of a particular interaction that was extremely positive or negative. Many a time, banks miss out on customers who had indifferent experiences.

You need to consider the overall experience of a customer with your bank based on most (if not all of his interactions to truly understand what he thinks about the bank. As the expectations of clients tend to evolve over a period, it’s essential to draw conclusions using a wider range of data. You must make sure your surveys capture the broader picture of your clients’ experiences to assess their satisfaction levels.

Metrics such as Net Promoter Score (NPS) and Customer Effort Score (CES) can be used to measure the level of customer engagement and loyalty. You can also conduct interviews with clients and utilize the data in your CRM system to get useful insights. You can leverage Salesforce’s best-in-the-class analytical capabilities to make the best use of all this data to identify areas of improvement.

Thus, Salesforce empowers you to understand customer expectations effectively and deliver excellent services to your clients. At Solunus, we work with you to unleash the power of the CRM system to delight your customers. Our team of experts has helped banking organizations of all sizes harness the immense potential of Salesforce to build strong relationships with their clientele and skyrocket their growth.

Hope you liked this post. How do you meet your customers’ expectations? Do share with us.

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.