Business Miscellaneous

Banking CRM: Top Features for Effective Customer Management

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Modern banking is not just about creating easy lending terms or building a convenient checking account for customers. It is about providing consistent, reliable, and quality information to customers so that they can build their knowledge of financial products and make an informed decision. And yes of course! All of these should be done at a much faster speed, following a customized approach, and ensuring personalization. Offering proactive insight in a seamless and effortless environment requires financial service companies to optimize their tools for customer relationship management (CRM). 

What is CRM in Banking?

Financial service providers cannot risk falling behind in the competitive landscape, considering that even a slightest margin can make a huge difference, whether it is for time, action, or money.  Only proactive insight can help companies meet the expectations of modern consumers and at the same time, build a profitable business. But how can they achieve this goal if they cannot visualize the end-to-end customer journey?

Banking CRM provides full visibility into customer account management, allowing financial services companies to track and monitor the sales and marketing funnel to understand how customers respond to business interactions. An analysis can help financial services companies know their customers better and make evidence-based decisions on the basis of real-time data. 

A powerful banking CRM can help sales leaders address a wide range of customer management challenges in finance, varying from building the ideal customer profile to analyzing a team’s performance and providing support in driving productivity and training and development measures. Here are the top 5 benefits of banking CRM:

  • Customer journey visualization: Allow users to visualize the entire lead to conversion journey. 
  • Track and monitor customer communication: As customer communication at all touchpoints is recorded properly, users can track and monitor those as and when needed for reference purposes. 
  • Marketing and sales integrations: Most CRM enables marketing and sales integrations to help users know which campaign generates what type of lead thus removing guesswork from the marketing. 
  • Outstanding customer service delivery:  CRM records all the data about customers, such as their birthdays or dates such as when they become the client of the company. Using this data, companies can create personalized campaigns to create more effective engagement.  

However, buying banking CRM software requires thoughtful consideration, because, while each solution provider claims to have power-packed solutions to transform customer relationship management, not every solution is a fit for your business. A key aspect here is that every business is unique and has a unique set of requirements. 

Leadership teams must evaluate the CRM application for financial services on a range of criteria to come up with the best suited application for their business, although some key features are mandatory for any customer relationship management tool.     

Top Banking CRM Features for Effective Customer Management  

With rising customer expectations and new technologies in sales and service management, banking CRM is no longer an option. While financial services leaders are driven to use the most advanced technologies to boost their business, buying the best CRM for the business requires a lot more than technology. 

Deep diving into business requirements and aligning them with software solutions is critical for a successful CRM purchase. Here are some of the top features you must have in your CRM. 

1. Consolidated data in one place

Having contact details in one place allows teams across departments to view, manage, and utilize the data effectively for their respective purposes. Not only does it provide full visibility into historical data of the contact from the entry into the sales funnel to conversion and payment, it allows the team to track leads engaged at every stage of the funnel, which is helpful in analyzing roadblocks and supportive pillars in conversion. 

2. Channel integrations

Invest in a software application that allows you to integrate multiple sources of your lead generation process. You should see which channel is generating the most leads, which channel generates the most revenue, and which channel needs significant effort to generate leads. For instance, it is possible that while your SEO is generating most leads, the most revenue generating channel is social media marketing. You could ramp up your efforts to optimize your SEO for better leads while focusing on social channels to generate more revenue.  

3. Data analytics and reporting 

No banking CRM software is complete without data analytics capabilities. Data powered tools backed by AI and machine learning technologies allow users to navigate every customer touchpoint and get proactive insight into customer activity. 

Data analytics and reporting capabilities empower your team to review every aspect of business performance, from sales revenue to time and money spent on lead generation. You can track which territory is the best for your business. Based on the insight you can allocate more resources to that specific territory. Also, you can set and define performance metrics for your sales team, and evaluate the performance of individual members on those KPIs.    

The Bottom-Line 

Banking CRM tools make customer management easy and fruitful. You can personalize your customer journey and build strong relationships with them based on insight generated from the CRM tool.

About the author

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Suyash Kaushik

Suyash is a customer experience manager at FieldCircle, a field service management software company. A writer by heart, he loves to spread the word around how customers interact with business across channels and the role of next-generation technology in customer experience and business success.