5 Ways a CRM Can Help Financial Services Close the Personalisation Gap

Digital transformation has been an imperative for financial services institutions over the course of the pandemic. The Salesforce Trends in Financial Services report shows that as customer demand for advanced digital capabilities soared, the financial services industry prioritised implementing new technologies over improving customer experience. However, this has left only 27% of customers feeling the financial services industry is customer-centric. 

Rather than replacing customer experience with the implementation of new technologies, there is an opportunity here for both of these priorities to work hand-in-hand. Indeed, new technologies, including customer relationship management (CRM) tools, can help create the personalised experiences customers demand from their banks and insurers.

1. Enabling a seamless omni-channel experience

Digital-first fintechs are already offering digitised personalisation. This inspires traditional banks and insurers to digitally transform as well. 

With face-to-face meetings with customers becoming less common, it’s essential for financial services institutions to offer innovative alternatives. Using a CRM for financial services can help. 

By bringing together real-time customer data from multiple sources and channels, a conversation can move seamlessly from chat bot to Messenger to email to phone call and back again. Given that 65% of customers say they often have to repeat information to different representatives, this kind of continuity is essential to providing personalised service.  Digital engagement is built into the Salesforce Financial Services Cloud platform, giving companies a 360-degree view of the customer. This interaction never falters as information from one encounter is carried through to the next in a timely, collaborative way. 

Banks and insurers often grapple with multiple systems, processes, and teams in an effort to create connected experiences for their customers. MuleSoft can integrate multiple systems to support the omni-channel experience that customers desire. 

2. Making every communication count

Meeting the digital transformation imperative doesn’t mean bombarding the customer with emails and messages just because you can. Rather, it’s about using technology to offer relevant communications to the right customer at the right time. The State of the Connected Customer report showed that 52% of customers expect offers to always be personalised.

Financial Services Cloud can facilitate personalised interactions with client profiles centred on personal goals, pivotal life events, and business milestones. It can help businesses nurture deeper relationships by staying in touch with proactive tracking and event alerts to remind you to reach out when a customer needs you most.

Tools like Email Studio segment audiences so banks and insurers can filter profiles rapidly and make relevant offerings to the customers most likely to respond. 

Journey Builder can expand on personalised communications by helping banks and insurers to deliver the right information to customers not just via email, but across web landing pages, ads, and apps. Instead of getting one-size-fits all solutions, customers are guided through a journey that adapts to real-time events like purchases, app downloads, or service cases.

3. Predicting needs with artificial intelligence

Key to solving a customer’s problem is knowing the customer. With CRM providing a single source of truth, the information needed to address an issue is always at hand.

A CRM tool that leverages the power of artificial intelligence (AI) can take that customer knowledge and personalisation to the next level. With Einstein, banking and insurance representatives can get deeper insights into their customers. Have they bought a new house or had a baby? Were they made redundant during the pandemic? Did they buy a new car?

It’s the kind of knowledge that allows banks and insurers to engage more proactively with their customers and more accurately forecast problems and opportunities. Einstein Discovery, together with Tableau and Financial Services Cloud, allows banks and insurers to prescribe corrective actions to help minimise client churn and maximise opportunities to grow account assets.

Einstein Relationship Insights (ERI) brings critical insights from disparate sources (including the web, news, and internal and external documents) to uncover the most relevant information for every customer and reveal new leads. 

AI capabilities can also help banking and insurance representatives engage with more empathy. This quality is in increasingly high demand, and one that represents a valuable competitive advantage. Salesforce research shows that 68% of customers expect the companies they engage with to demonstrate empathy, but only 37% say this actually happens. 

Transparency and regulatory compliance around how personal information is gathered and accessed is crucial. With consumers more aware of digital privacy regulations, having a clear data protection policy presents an opportunity to nurture a relationship of trust with the customer. 

4. Supporting collaboration

Integrated with Salesforce Financial Services Cloud, Slack is a powerful tool for collaboration that ultimately helps improve the customer experience. Slack enables banking and insurance representatives to pull in the right people and the right data for a conversation in the context of a specific opportunity, case, or campaign. 

Case swarming is a collaborative approach to customer service. Service agents can resolve issues by calling upon expertise from other teams, while simultaneously guiding the customer. Slack’s integration with CRM gives a 360-degree view of the customer, while the channel format allows the representative to gain input at speed. 

In corporate and investment banking, Slack integrates with Financial Services Cloud to offer dedicated deal rooms. These rooms are where all the parties involved in a complex sale can stay on top of the ebb and flow of account activities. 

For investment banking and advisory teams competing to win more deal mandates, Slack and Financial Services Cloud are now purpose-built for deal teams. Together, both can help fuel productivity with actionable insights and research, a deeper understanding of clients, and built-in compliance to collaborate and share sensitive information throughout the lifecycle of a deal.

5. Using automation for efficiency and personalisation

Automation has a key role to play in improving efficiencies and the customer experience in financial services. 

Whether it’s opening a new bank account, applying for a loan, updating an insurance policy, or reporting a stolen card, customers expect a seamless digital process. CRM can help achieve this by automating as much of the process as possible. That could include forms that are automatically populated with the customer’s data or automating a series of personalised emails that take the customer through the loan application process. 

Digital Process Automation (DPA) can extend the power of Financial Services Cloud by providing click-based configuration and integration tools that simplify the creation and delivery of branded, automated customer experiences.

As autonomous finance emerges across the banking and insurance sectors, automating tasks such as account transfers or claims processing will further leverage the power of AI to deliver optimised, personalised customer experiences. 

Discover six strategies for using a CRM to deliver the personalised experiences customers want. Download our e-book, Hyper-personalisation: Key to the Future of Digital Banking in ASEAN, here.