As customer expectations of experiences provided by financial firms continue to increase, delivering seamless CX across all digital and in-person channels becomes even more critical. For example, most respondents (57%) to the 2024 Retail Banking Trends and Priorities report commissioned by Q2 considered improving the digital experience for consumers their top strategic priority in 2024.
CRM software for financial services, with its data consolidation and workflow automation capabilities, can help financial firms enhance customer experience and thus become more competitive. This article explores the notion of finance CRM software and highlights three advantages companies can get from its proper adoption.
Finance CRM: Solution Overview
Finance CRM is a CRM system tailored to the needs of financial services companies. Like any other CRM, a finance CRM system consolidates customer data gathered from across multiple channels and provides marketing, customer service, and sales management capabilities. Additionally, finance CRM solutions also include industry-specific data models and features, such as the following:
· Loan management
· Accounting management
· Investment portfolio management
· Financial risk management
· Financial reporting and analytics
3 Reasons Why Financial Institutions Need a Dedicated CRM Solution
Here are three essential advantages of financial CRM for commercial banks, insurance agencies, investment services providers, and other financial firms:
· More personalized financial services and products
As noted earlier, finance CRM can provide different departments of an institution with a unified customer view. Sales, accounting, and portfolio managers can quickly check necessary customer information, including his or her contacts, demographics, past transactions, and records of interactions with the company.
This plethora of data helps employees better understand the preferences of each customer and personalize products and services more efficiently, ensuring customer satisfaction.
Banco Inter is a Brazilian digital bank providing banking, investment, and insurance services to over 33 million customers worldwide. The company adopted a Salesforce-based CRM to consolidate customer data, create comprehensive customer profiles, and segment these profiles into multiple audiences to help employees tailor customer communication and deliver more accurate product offers.
Additionally, Banco Inter integrated its CRM with a customer data analytics platform, allowing employees to analyze customer profiles and their preferences on a daily basis. As a result, employees can easily generate customer engagement scores to identify new audience segments and make CX even more personalized, which already helped the company achieve a 35x increase in conversion rates.
· Improved time to resolution in customer support
Time to resolution is a metric representing the average time it takes a financial institution to address customer claims, transaction disputes, and other types of inquiries. Since customers don’t like to wait, lengthy resolution times can negatively affect their experience. Finance CRM can help an institution improve customer support efficiency and time to resolution, once again helping improve customer satisfaction.
Finance CRM equipped with customer support automation can be very useful for companies in this context. Such a feature can automatically route customer inquiries to appropriate agents and support reps, ensuring faster first response time. Companies can additionally integrate finance CRM with AI-powered chatbots that can provide support reps with relevant responses to customer queries, improving overall time to resolution.
PenFed, one of the largest federal credit unions in the US, implemented a CRM solution integrated with AI-powered bots to provide more efficient omnichannel customer support for 2.9 million of its members. Today, AI-powered chatbots help PenFed handle 60% of all customer support cases (20% of which are resolved by bots on the first contact). This allows human support agents to focus on more complex cases and resolve them faster.
Additionally, since customers can access automated support via live chat, human support agents also can answer and process call center calls more efficiently. This allowed PenFed’s call center to reduce its average speed to answer from a minute to 30–45 seconds, which improved customers’ satisfaction, since now they almost do not have to wait.
· Customer portfolio optimization
Among other things, finance CRM can enable a company to manage customers’ investment portfolios more efficiently and help maximize returns on their
investments, thus ensuring increased customer satisfaction. In particular, CRM equipped with portfolio management functionalities can be used by asset managers to personalize investment portfolios based on customer trading histories, choose the best mix of assets, and monitor portfolio performance to help customers achieve their financial goals.
Finance CRM equipped with portfolio management enabled WINVEST, a Switzerland-based asset management firm, to consolidate siloed customer finance and portfolio data under one roof. After running customer data integration and implementing features like investment recommendation monitoring and post-trade checks into the CRM, a company’s asset managers can work faster, make more intelligent investment decisions, and reduce tracking errors to help customers maintain healthy cash flows.
Final Thoughts
Providing outstanding customer experiences and increasing customer satisfaction is critical for any firm aiming to remain competitive in the modern financial service industry. Finance CRM systems that include industry-specific data models and functionality sets can help institutions provide more personalized financial products and services, address transaction disputes and financial claims more efficiently, and help customers make more profitable investment decisions, all helping enhance customer satisfaction.
Nonetheless, if an institution aims to implement finance CRM and reap all its advantages, enlisting the help of third-party CRM developers is recommended. Experienced CRM developers can analyze an institution’s operations and define its business needs to select an optimal platform-based or custom finance CRM solution and handle its development, integration, data migration, and other technical tasks, helping a company ensure a smooth CRM transformation.
