BOK Financial Corporation Banks on Salesforce CRM: Training and Consulting Compound High Returns

Few industries are as competitive as financial services, which is why so many banks turn to customer relationship management (CRM) software to refine their customer-facing business processes. Not all of them succeed. As BOK Financial Corporation (BOKF) has learned, success is driven by clear implementation goals and a successful training regimen that gets everybody in the organization on board.

Teri Dreyer, director of CRM at BOKF, recalls the predicament that led BOKF to salesforce.com's door: "We needed to be able to share information within the sales teams-easily and consistently-and we needed to show management an accurate pipeline," she explains. "Our former CRM systems were used by less than 50 percent of our commercial banking group. We knew we could do better."

Since implementing Salesforce CRM, BOKF has done better-much better. Today, more than 90 percent of its users rely on Salesforce CRM to access and exchange critical customer information, at every stage in the business relationship.

Easing Growth Pains

Much of BOKF's growth is due to acquisitions, which resulted in numerous front-office information systems. Before salesforce.com came on the scene, relationship managers had an incomplete view of their customers, reports were difficult to generate, and many CRM processes did not integrate with the bank's core banking system. In short, BOKF spent too much time gathering information to make business decisions. Outbound marketing campaigns were not well integrated with CRM processes.

BOKF wanted a cohesive, on-demand CRM solution that would be easy to use and maintain, while providing the relationship managers with a complete view into customer accounts and banking histories. Salesforce.com's CRM met the organization's critical requirements, and it also delivered ad hoc reporting capabilities, fast integration with Microsoft Outlook, and the ability to leverage the bank's core systems via a secure architecture.

BOKF purchased 500 Salesforce CRM licenses for its Banking and Wealth Management groups. It also engaged Salesforce.com Consulting to host an Executive Workshop, conduct a business process review, assist with the CRM implementation, and help integrate the new software with its core banking system. Finally, BOKF enlisted Salesforce.com Training & Certification to conduct a train-the-trainer program.

"Salesforce.com offered the best functionality in its class, along with a roster of training and implementation services to help us get started," notes Charles Sparks, senior vice president of Commercial Operations at BOKF.

Help from the Experts at Salesforce.com

Salesforce.com's Salesforce.com Consulting helped the bank create a customized information architecture to accommodate a diverse set of CRM data and applications, thus aligning the bank's existing business processes with its planned CRM initiatives. The rollout took 150 days, which included five weeks of training.

The BOK Financial team worked with the salesforce.com consultants to create  executive dashboards that display current information in an intuitive, actionable format-including pipeline opportunities, deals won, trends, top performers, and adoption metrics. "Our executives want to know the status of any given relationship at any point in time," says Sparks. "These dashboards within the application keep them in touch with this information at all times."

Bank personnel got on board quickly, aided by a well-defined training program. To kick-start the adoption process, four employees attended the Administrator Workshop, where they developed their core skills. "We used salesforce.com's material as a model for creating our own training sessions," Dreyer says. "Salesforce.com also helped us customize the training program to accommodate our processes and terminology as part of a 'train the trainer' session."

Meanwhile, other CRM stakeholders attended an Executive Workshop to learn how the new CRM software could be applied within all of their lines of business. "Salesforce.com helped us collaborate better, especially during the initial rollout," says Sparks. "The business process review was a valuable investment. That's where we laid out the CRM infrastructure and customized the application to each of our user groups. Salesforce.com Consulting was absolutely critical to that meeting."

Results Through Integration

According to Sparks, integrating Salesforce CRM Sales with the bank's existing business processes was relatively easy. BOKF worked closely with salesforce.com to integrate and deploy the new CRM software. Representatives from Salesforce.com Consulting also helped with the migration from the company's three legacy CRM solutions. "The challenge came with connecting Salesforce CRM to all our other sales processes," Sparks says. "That's where Salesforce.com Consulting was so helpful."

BOKF operates in a highly regulated industry and must be extremely careful about what financial information it reveals through the CRM software. Salesforce.com helped accommodate its security requirements as part of the implementation.

BOKF is also integrating a proprietary commissions payment solution to Salesforce CRM, which presents incentive information from the core systems as opportunities are closed. "We've done all the integration via Salesforce CRM tabs and Web links to maintain a cohesive user experience," says Sparks.

Banking on the Future

Thanks to the concerted efforts of the CRM team and Salesforce.com Consulting, overall Salesforce CRM usage at BOKF has increased from 58 percent to 90 percent in just eight months. "Department managers and executives realize the power of dashboards and have become true believers in the application," says Dreyer. "As a result, they are pushing our sales teams to use the software."

The next phase in the Salesforce CRM implementation will streamline case management for BOKF's commercial customer service team, helping it meet the company's vision of providing "nationally competitive products with the responsive customer service characteristics of a local bank."

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