Successful organizations today are those that prioritize providing excellent experiences for customers. For financial services organizations in particular, building trust with customers and providing them with human-first customer service makes a significant impact in garnering loyalty and repeated use of products and services.
Anticipating customer needs begins with a customer relationship management (CRM) platform that provides a streamlined, 360-degree view of all customer transactions and interactions. Financial services organizations can leverage a CRM to track customer transaction histories and lifecycle stages. From there, they can extract insights to identify what products and services customers are most likely to seek out next.
A CRM is integral for financial services firms of all types, from fintech startups to traditional lenders undergoing digital transformation. Whether you’re a digital mortgage originator or it’s the AI-powered budgeting tool — we’ve identified the benefits of using a CRM for financial services and how your organization can easily make the switch.
What Are the Benefits of Switching to a Modern CRM for Financial Services?
Financial services companies, like brands in most industries, rely on delivering an excellent customer experience to garner customer loyalty. With the right CRM, companies can gather more information about their customers, outperform competitors and deliver better support. Whether you’re a bank, credit company, brokerage, or other type of finserv firm – having the right CRM solution is essential for your business’s success.
The benefits of implementing a modern CRM for financial services organizations include:
- Unified view of clients
- AI & chatbots to augment your support team
- Security measures for consumer confidence
- Insights to improve operations
- Increased retention
1. Unified View of Clients
Transactions are at the center of most financial services firms’ business. Therefore, an omnichannel CRM should provide a unified view of the company’s clients. For financial services, this means that the CRM can trace and aggregate all of a customer’s prior transactions with them in one place and give companies a more thorough understanding of their financial position. Furthermore, as financial services customers increasingly expect to do business digitally, it’s no longer enough to simply be available on all channels – your agents need to be able to seamlessly switch between channels during a conversation without losing context
Customers expect to be remembered, and a modern CRM should provide a 360-view of the entire customer journey across all transactions and channels. Not only should a CRM manage all of your client contacts (names, phone numbers, addresses), but it should also store important information like purchase history, previous communication and any other relevant data your company decides to keep for each customer.
You should seek out an omnichannel CRM that ensures that everyone on your team can view client conversations in real-time and progress conversations forward without clients having to repeat information. A modern CRM for financial services like Kustomer ingests data from all your systems and organizes it into a single actionable timeline view, enabling you to help clients reach their financial goals.
2. AI & Chatbots to Augment Your Support Team
Most companies can’t afford to have unlimited agents working 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Fortunately technology like AI and chatbots can enable customer service teams to work more efficiently and focus on the customers who need the most help.
Chatbots can be used to answer simple questions like payment status or business hours, and direct customers to a help center if human intervention is not needed. They can also be used to gather initial information before sending a conversation to a live agent.
Having AI and automation in place will be essential to free up your support team’s time. Leveraging automation to reduce the time spent on low-level, repetitive queries will allow them to then spend more time strategically identifying customers by location or those that might have delinquent payments, which will enable them to proactively address customer needs more effectively.
3. Security Measures for Consumer Confidence
Without a doubt, one of the biggest threats to financial processes are vulnerabilities related to cybersecurity. Many customers have apprehensions related to protecting their accounts and sensitive data. As a result, financial services companies need a CRM that is secure and can safeguard client funds and data from malicious threats.
A modern CRM for financial services should be designed to meet the enterprise security, compliance and privacy requirements of an organization. A key security feature that finserv organizations should seek out in a CRM is role-based-permissioning. With it, you can rest assured that your client trust remains intact since it ensures that employees can only access information and perform actions they need to do their jobs.
4. Insights to Improve Operations
Customer data isn’t collected just for the sake of having it. The goal is to use your CRM to compile this information and then leverage it to anticipate customer needs and provide exceptional customer experiences. Organizations that succeed will be those that have a technology stack that can aggregate and process customer data and share it across the organization when and where it’s needed.
A firm that functions as a lender could take data from CRM for financial services and leverage AI-derived insights to identify customers that might be experiencing credit loss and offer them a delayed payment plan. The firm wins by empowering customers to minimize delinquencies and, in the process, generates customer loyalty.
Another way that firms can leverage insights from the CRM would be to use the unified view to identify upsell opportunities for existing customers based on their demographic, financial priorities and various other personal information. By identifying which services are most relevant to each segmented group, financial services firms and lenders can craft outreach specifically tailored to individual clients and automate messages all within the CRM itself.
5. Increased Retention
Customer loyalty is the goal. Successful financial organizations leverage the robust tools within a CRM to provide customers with exceptional support experiences that delight them and turn them into loyal clients, increasing overall retention rates.
Linking a customer’s financial holdings, activities and relationships by connecting your company’s digital touchpoints, provides a full client history all in one place. By gathering and analyzing data from these interactions, businesses can better understand their customers’ needs and preferences, enabling them to provide personalized experiences and tailor their offerings to meet individual customer needs. For example, this information could allow wealth advisors and lenders to support customer needs quicker and more efficiently.
Customers need access to their accounts and clients expect to engage with their advisors from anywhere. CRM technology can help to meet these expectations by providing proactive customer service through employee reminders or automated messages.
Modern CRMs for financial services increase customer retention by providing a comprehensive view of the customer journey, enabling personalized experiences, facilitating seamless communication across channels and automating certain tasks to improve the overall customer experience.
How Your Organization Can Easily Make the Switch
If you are not reaping the benefits of a modern CRM like the ones outlined above, here are a couple tips on how your organization can easily make the switch.
Get Executive Buy-In & Allocate Budget for Tools
The first step is to ensure you have the executive buy-in and budget for a modern CRM that will allow your support team to delight your clients. Our own research shows that the top reasons that organizations aren’t adopting CRMs are a lack of executive buy-in (34%) and a lack of budget (56%). If your organization’s leadership doesn’t understand the value behind adopting a CRM, they likely won’t allocate a budget for them and you’ll be left with a legacy system that prohibits you from delivering exceptional support.
Prepare and Transfer the Data
Make it a priority to sort through old data and clean up client records before you start transferring systems. It’s important to organize only the essential client information you want the company to take into the new CRM. The more organized you can get your old CRM before transferring, the easier the process will be.
From here, export and import should be fairly simple. Start with exporting your old CRM data. Your new CRM should offer a migration tool that transfers all data for all fields from all standard objects: calendars, emails and notes, customer leads, client account details, employee users and roles, various contacts and more.
Most modern CRMs will have a migration tool that imports the exported data, so no one should have to import the data manually. All of the legwork is done by the migration tool for a smooth transition. Once the transfer is complete, all users should login and start getting familiar.
Grow With the Top-Rated CRM for Customer Service & Make the Switch to Kustomer
Switching from an old, outdated CRM that’s bursting with both important and unnecessary information may seem daunting at first, but the benefits of migrating your financial services CRM software to a modern system outway the initial effort in the long run. Not only will your employees and company be much better organized, but your clients will have an improved customer experience, resulting in higher growth and revenue.
