Today more than ever, customer knowledge is one of the major levers of marketing and sales performance.
For banks, a CRM database contributes significantly to improving the customer experience. It helps them organize and store information about their customers including contact information, transaction history, and records of previous interactions.
What is a CRM software?
CRM or Customer Relationship Management is a strategy for managing a company’s relationships and interactions with its customers or potential customers. A CRM system helps companies interact with customers on an ongoing basis, streamline their processes, and improve profitability.
A CRM for banking acts as a unified solution to keep track of every employee, customer, and transaction. Most importantly, it can predict customer behavior and the outcome of sales pipelines, with revenue projections by product or task.
However, a banking CRM software can do much more, from scheduling appointments to managing leads to generating performance reports, all from a single dashboard.
With a CRM software, you will find relevant solutions to:
- Improve your sales performance.
- Know your customer portfolio precisely.
- Organize your sales force.
- Save time by creating a 360-degree view of customers, capturing their interactions with the company, and highlighting the data required to improve customer conversations.
Why use a CRM in the banking industry?
In a sector as competitive as banking, where rates are often comparable from one bank to another, banks are increasingly developing additional services (membership bonus, “boosted” rate, free application fees, etc.). Customer knowledge thus makes it possible to target and personalize additional services to acquire new customers.
Increased productivity
The successful implementation of a CRM solution for the banking industry can benefit sales and employees’ productivity. First, it reduces costs by cutting down on repetitive administrative tasks such as data entry and contact registration. It streamlines your entire sales process, keeping everyone involved informed of progress in real-time. Since the software does most of the work, bankers can process more transactions in less time.
Better online branding
Marketing today has come a long way from the traditional approach of billboards and newspaper ads.
All businesses regardless of their sector have gone digital to create a presence on various social media platforms and be closer to their audience. However, while the integration of digital allows financial institutions to reach a mass audience with low advertising costs, it also brings challenges. Customers share their experiences online and are more likely to talk about the bad than the good, which can ruin your bank’s reputation.
In this context, using CRM software for your bank helps you manage your online reputation by monitoring conversations about your bank and its services on the web. You can get in touch with your customers, answer their questions, and solve any problems that arise.
→ Banking sector: How to set up an efficient digital strategy?
Improved communication with customers
For your bank, a CRM software keeps track of all the conversations that happen across multiple channels including emails, calls, social media interactions, etc. It updates information in real-time so that any bank representative trying to talk to a potential customer can pick up on the last conversation. The success of your sales team depends on their understanding of their customers’ needs. When your representative has all the updated information, communication is made easier.
According to IBM, a CRM software can improve customer retention by 26%.
Cross-departmental data tracking
Data collection and analysis can help launch corporate marketing campaigns, products, and services to help attract more customers.
Banking CRM tracks data from multiple departments, including customer service, cash deposit, and others to document and enrich customer request management, consolidate multi-channel requests, and thus better manage them. It then analyzes the data to gain an in-depth understanding of a customer’s needs and provides personalized services based on his or her profile, financial, asset, professional, family situation, etc.
Read also:
→ From Big Data to Smart Data in the banking sector
How to build a CRM database for your bank?
Understanding how to create an effective customer database can contribute to the success of your marketing and sales efforts. Consider the following steps to create a customer database:
1. Define the functions of the database
It is important to define and understand the functions of your customer database. An effective customer database system should perform the following four functions of customer relationship management:
Operational functions: operational customer relationship management builds on the related strategic management database to assist in the day-to-day operation of the banking organization. For example, your bank representative will be able to access a customer’s history to determine the type of loan he or she may be interested in.
Collaborative functions: A collaborative CRM database is an important element in aligning the different departments of your bank and facilitating the exchange between them.
Analytical functions: Customer relationship analytical functions use data to support marketing efforts and create value for customers. For example, you can offer a discount to your regular customers based on the data collected in the customer database system.
Strategic activities: Strategic customer relationships require information about markets, customers, market offerings, competitors, distribution channels, and the ability to identify new customers and methods the company can use to attract its target audience.
→ The Digital Revolution In Banking
2. Determine the type of information that will be housed in the customer database
Most database models will include information such as:
Contact information:
- Customer name
- Contact information (email, address, phone number)
- Preferred contact method
- Source of supply
Purchase Data:
- Items Purchased
- Value of previous sales
- Date of purchase
- Payment method
- Overdue invoices
Demographic Information:
– Date of birth
– Region of residence
– Areas of interests
– Income level & background
Outcomes:
- Survey results
- Complaints, questions, or feedback from customers
- Last interaction and outcome
- Customer satisfaction score
All of this information can help you evaluate whether or not your current efforts are working and what percentage of people will buy from you again and why. Understanding trends among customers and prospects will help you personalize your communication and improve your approach based on real observations. Besides, it allows you to understand how customers move through your sales cycle.
3. Define data sources
Understanding your customer requires a detailed analysis of where to collect the right data and by what means. By defining the most important information, you can measure and analyze the best ways to engage them, to ultimately sell more. You can start collecting customer information from the following sources:
- Events
- Website forms
- Special offers and contests
- Customer history
- Surveys
4. Structuring the data
Once you have determined what type of database is best for your organization, it is important to define how you will structure the data. This means capturing marketing information into marketing segments that you can access to make informed decisions about your marketing efforts. Similarly, you can keep track of sales details to analyze the information you gather and apply it to your sales strategies.
To ensure that marketing and sales data is accurate, you can validate information, duplicate data, merge, and compare data from two or more sources.
5. Expanding the database
Once you have created the database, the next step is to expand it with other sources. To do this, you can use the data from existing customer details to search for similar information using the data generated by the campaign. An expanded database can help you analyze a larger amount of customer data, which strengthens your position in competitive markets.
You can also contact data companies that offer services to increase your database with missing information such as email addresses, phone numbers, standard industry classifications, contacts, and employee numbers.
6. Keeping the database up to date
It is important to keep company and customer data up-to-date to ensure accuracy. You can update your customer databases in several ways:
- By adding data from new campaigns
- By removing data from inactive customers
- By asking customers to update their records
In today’s environment where communication is part of our daily lives, maintaining a reliable and stable relationship between a consultant and his client is fundamental. By consolidating all data about each of their customers, banks can improve the customer experience and satisfaction while reducing costs. If you operate in the banking sector and you need support to manage your customer database, do not hesitate to contact us.