Every day, you’re engaging with your customers in the “moment of opportunity” — but are you capitalizing on the chance to nurture that relationship, drive sales, and improve profitability?
There’s an efficiency problem in the financial industry. Opportunity is out there, with both new and existing customers, but it is regularly hindered by obscured data, undefined processes, and a lack of communication across the organization. Here are some tactics for making sure that you are optimizing your customer relationships and maximizing your bottom line.
Empower Your Frontline Workers
According to this report from McKinsey in a banking environment with strong bottom-line pressures, maximizing frontline sales performance should be top priority. Your frontline staff has the daily opportunity to deliver valuable customer-specific sales and service messages to customers during those interactions — but most banks fail to capitalize on these moments of opportunity due to a lack of actionable data.
What if you could prompt employees at your frontline, call center, or during any customer interaction with customer-specific sales and service messages? By leveraging CRM, you can trigger a message to your staff while they are servicing the customer within their regular system, right at the moment of opportunity. By doing so, you empower effective cross-selling by using data-driven automation to identify what products or services to offer your customer.
Personalize Every Interaction
In addition to making sure those frontline messages happen in real time, it’s also vital to tailor your communications to each customer’s profile and needs — whether it’s a timely birthday wish, an operational command to collect their email address, or white glove treatment for a profitable customer. These customized communications make every interaction feel more personal.
Personalization doesn’t have to end with existing customers. You can also streamline and automate the onboarding process for new ones. As soon as a new customer is in your CRM, you can automatically trigger a suite of customizable messages that thank them for their business, offer them valuable content, and continue to nurture your relationship with them.
Inspire with Goals & Incentives
More and more banks are realizing the value of incentive plans. By automating the process of tracking employee goals and incentives, both employees and their supervisors will have access to timely information that helps enact behavioral change.
Unlike manual systems, where data input can be inconsistent or delayed, you can use CRM technology to update information on a daily basis for actionable insight into goals and incentives. This up-to-date information allows you to track behavior and readjust in real-time so that employees know where they stand, where they need to get to in achieving goals, and the incentives associated with those goals.
Get a Full View of Your Data
You have a full picture of your customer at your fingertips — but, to see it, you must unify data both from core banking and ancillary systems. A comprehensive view of customer information gives you the wealth of actionable data necessary to drive effective marketing, customer service, and sales efforts. With a full view of your data, you are equipped to make decisions based on the whole picture.
For instance, when it comes to profitability, looking an individual accounts gives you too narrow a view. Instead, take a look at your entire relationship with the customer and its overall profitability. By unifying data, you can quickly know the value of your accounts and household relationships, and see customer ranking, trends, and month-to-date profitability. This enables you to create programs for retaining top customers and grow the others.
Leverage Automation
You, like most people, probably have several Post-It notes scattered across your desktop right now with to-dos, contact information, and the names of people to follow up with. You are not alone. However, this “Post-It Note CRM” system makes manually keeping up with customer relationships, managing marketing campaigns, and tracking sales efforts cumbersome and inefficient. Automation promotes customer retention, nurtures relationships, and grows customers by allowing you to promote the right services to the right people at the right time.
More financial institutions are turning to automation to trigger nurturing campaigns, track sales results, and engage with their customers. This report points to automation as the key for more effective operations in financial institutions. By automating nonessential time demands (such as generating reports and compiling them in an integrated digital dashboard), you make time for the revenue-generating activities.
