A Scalable Strategy for Treating Customers Like Family
Does your bank’s value proposition sound something like this? “We have great relationships with our customers. We treat them like family: We know their names, their kids’ names and their birthdays.”
If so, congratulations — that’s no small feat! You’re likely building loyal customers and brand advocates that will help you grow your business and maximize your bottom line. But what happens when you expand past the point of being able to know every single one of your customers?
The truth is that, if things go like you hope they will, you will reach a point when you can’t possibly get to know all your customers on the same intimate one-on-one basis that you did before. But that doesn’t mean you have to stop treating your customers like family.
By developing the right processes and leveraging the latest technology, you can equip your entire staff with the information they need to make customers feel like family in every interaction. Here are a few scalable ways to start:
1. Have All Their Information Right On Hand
As your customer base grows, it’s not realistic to try to retain all the essential information in your head. A CRM system allows you to leverage data to build strong profiles of individual customers so that your off-the-cuff knowledge is appropriately captured and accessible whenever you need it. With the right tools, you can keep everything you need to know about a customer in a single, easy-to-access place. Insight into their deposits, loans, relationships, preferences and more will make each interaction feel friendly, personalized and responsive.
2. Document All Your Interactions With Them
Record important customer and prospect interactions so your team can be more helpful and informed in every encounter. Using a CRM, everyone on your team can easily see a log of a customer’s past interactions with the bank. That record contains their basic information, but also a place to jot down their children’s names, household relationships or a reminder about their recent move. It gives you a place to make notes and track each interaction, opportunity, and need so that they can be seen and shared by others on your team.
3. Offer Them Personalized Customer Service
With all that information at your fingertips, you will also be better equipped to provide above-and-beyond customer service — even when you need to hand off a customer to someone else on your team. Instead of having to catch that person up on the entire relationship, they can view it with the click of a button. And it won’t just be one person’s context; it will include notes from everyone who has ever interacted with that customer within their profile. Even when your customer is sitting across from a new face, they will still feel at home.
4. Tailor Your Communications
The 360 View CRM takes great customer service one step further by allowing you to prompt frontline employees with customer-specific sales and service messages during any customer interaction, whether in person or on the phone. You can also tailor your communications to each person — even when you’re not there. Whether it’s a birthday wish, an operational command to collect their email address, or white glove treatment for a profitable customer, these customized communications will make every customer feel known and valued by you.
5. Continue to Improve Customer Profitability
By having all your records on a customer documented and digitized, you give your sales team everything they need to prospect, manage contacts, record activities and ultimately close more business opportunities. You can use the CRM to create referrals and send your customer to the person best able to service them. Their profile enables you to identify cross-sell opportunities and offer them products or services they need, right when they need them. You can also proactively gear your marketing toward them by automating messages with personalized touches, like congratulating them on their team’s recent win!
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These tactics, taken together, allow you to build a strong and scalable relationship with each customer that comes through your doors. By knowing your customer, demonstrating that you care about their experience and learning more about them with every interaction, you can maintain that personalized service that makes people feel like family.