Banks and wealth management businesses are struggling to anticipate their customers’ needs, centrally manage their data, and create highly personalized digital experiences for their customers. To that end, they’re embracing cloud technology and solutions customized for their industry from Salesforce.
If this sounds like your organization, then it’s time to get in line with how customers want to engage with their bank or wealth management provider. They expect high quality digital experiences. In fact, 78% of banking customers initiate relationships with a new bank through websites and mobile apps.
Adopting the Salesforce platform can help your business create customer experiences that cater to their individual needs, goals, and convenience. To get started, tap into Salesforce expertise through fractional hiring so you can accelerate the transformation of your business into a customer-centric, digital-first experience.
Three reasons to bank on Salesforce
Implementing a new Salesforce instance, or improving the one you already have, can seem daunting. But if you fail to do it, you risk falling behind your competitors and losing your customers. Here are three reasons why you should take the plunge now, instead of kicking the can down the road another year:
1. Improve customer interactions
Your customers have given you a lot of information about what they need from your services. Number of logins, chatbot conversations, website visits, and ad clicks all build a picture of which products users need and how they want to be served.
Slow to change businesses are running on siloed databases across sales, marketing, and customer service. Those financial firms miss out on important user engagement insights and end up wasting resources on sending out irrelevant offers to customers while missing the opportunity to connect with those who are likely prospects.
To deliver the right offer to the right person, you need the right tools to improve your customers’ experience. Start with a centralized repository of every interaction with your brand, which enables you to use actionable insights in the data to deliver timely and relevant offers.
2. Increase collaboration
Traditionally, banking and wealth management services have been handled through a hodgepodge of siloed software and files. When information was centrally collected, maybe a few times a year, it quickly became out of date.
Now we have a better way to update data across the organization. By continuously aligning marketing, sales, and customer support data, your company can work cohesively across departments.
Marketing can create campaigns that send high quality leads to sales reps. Sales reps can help resolve support issues within the sales process. Customer service reps can identify when a customer is primed for an upsell.
But collaboration isn’t just for internal purposes. Bring your customers into the conversation. Your business can show your customers that you truly understand them by using their feedback and patterns to create the right customer journey for them.
3. Achieve primacy
Your customers’ behavior and product usage is already telling you how likely they are to leave your business for your competitor. Today, securing primacy means having the best digital customer experience.
Primacy makes your relationship with a customer much harder to disrupt. Tailoring the customer journey using the layers of insight you collect gives them exactly what they want – a truly personalized digital experience.
Salesforce cloud offerings
Salesforce offers multiple cloud products for sales, customer service, and marketing. Since they all work on the same Salesforce platform, data can easily be shared, or restricted, across the whole company.
Financial Services Cloud
Banking and wealth management companies asked Salesforce for a CRM tool that meets their regulatory compliance and sales needs and Salesforce answered. Financial Services Cloud is one of the newest Salesforce products and unifies the customer experience across all data sources, including consumer and commercial lines of business and geographies.
Service Cloud
Using Service Cloud, you can streamline and automate your customer service processes and workflows so the right agents can assist customers. It also helps your customer service reps recommend new products using a full picture of the customer journey.
Marketing Cloud
Your company spends a lot of money on marketing. Marketing Cloud makes sure that your money is funneled to campaigns with the highest ROI, whether your customer is engaging in store, online, or over the phone. The leads from your marketing campaigns can be routed automatically to the right sales teams for follow up.
Hire the right people for the job
Some companies start their Salesforce journey by looking internally for a developer or IT person who understands APEX, the Salesforce proprietary language. As capable as they may be, your IT people won’t know about all of the Salesforce tools, integrations, and out-of-the-box features that can save your business time and money.
Other companies start by hiring a full time Salesforce administrator. Onboarding this employee and teaching them about your existing Salesforce instance, and how it’s integrated with the rest of your tech stack, can take months. Learning how to choose the right tools or managed services from the Salesforce AppExchange can take even longer.
The typical turnover rate for employees with cloud computing skills is a whopping 42%. In a competitive hiring market, your Salesforce admin might stick around for just a year or two, leaving you to start over with a new hire. Upgrading your Salesforce workflows and processes can take years.
Hiring fractional Salesforce experts
Working with fractional employment vendors gives your company access to a full team of experts. In contrast to the limitations of an in-house admin, fractional hiring allows you to start working on transforming your Salesforce CRM, right away.
Fractional consultants are continuously educated on the best practices for Salesforce implementation. There’s no way one admin can learn everything there is to know about Salesforce in time for multiple projects a year.
Fractional hiring vendors also provide fully developed delivery models to ensure projects are done right, on time, and in compliance with all regulations. You’ll have a game plan and trusted partner to help you advance from where you are now to your ideal Salesforce setup.
Finally, while your in-house admin can update workflows, create dashboards, and resolve bugs, fractional workers can take big, strategic ideas and make them reality. That’s because each admin is backed by a whole team of experts to lean on. Their knowledge allows for transformational work, like mapping your customer journey, rather than Salesforce upkeep and report generation.
Putting the right customer management system in place is the first step toward improving your customers’ experience. The next step is getting people with the skills needed to extract value out of the tech stack. The two together is what gives businesses a competitive edge.
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