Last month, salesforce.com hosted a series of meetings with community bank leaders across the US. The objective of these councils was to gain a better understanding of what banks need from Salesforce in order to achieve their technology and business objectives. 

At the same time, Salesforce showed these executives the latest solutions they have been working on for banks. As a Salesforce partner, Arkus was there to help drive the conversation, answer questions, and bring industry specific knowledge to the discussions.

Here are three things banks told us they are doing or want to do with Salesforce and the Salesforce1 Platform:

1. Implementation

A big focus area for was how to first implement the Salesforce1 Platform at a bank. Some banks took a vertical approach, implementing a group or two within the bank with deep vertical functionality built out. For example, implementing a new commercial or retail loan management pipeline with workflows and approvals. The other approach was to go bank wide with a horizontal solution such as referral management, giving everyone access to Salesforce. Each path had its own challenges and successes and neither was deemed better than the other.

Key Takeaway:  Recognize the type of approach that will work for your bank and stick to it – especially during the first phase of a rollout. “Don’t get caught up in trying to do everything all at the same time” was a quote we captured during these meetings. As with most successful Salesforce implementations, a “crawl, walk, run” framework works best for banks.

2. Integration

Integration with core banking solutions, such as Jack Henry, Fiserv, and FIS, was top of mind for most of the attendees at our banking councils. For some of the attendees, this work had already been done. For others, it was an enlightening experience to hear how other banks were doing integrations. Many bankers didn’t realize the extent to which Salesforce can be integrated with all manner of other systems. The Salesforce1 Platform is built to allow integrations with virtually any system. For many bankers, the trust.salesforce.com site was also an eye-opener, with many of them not having seen that sort of transparency in system performance from a vendor before. 

Key Takeaway: Find the right parties at the start of the project and agree on the volume, type, and direction of data that will be pulled from the core system, and any other system integrations the bank needs. Another great place to look for integrations is Salesforce’s AppExchange, which has a number of pre-built integrations for banks. Integration with core systems was not wishful thinking, but an achievable business objective with significant benefits to the banks that have done it.

3. Adoption

The number one issue that came up meeting after meeting was adoption. There was a lot of talk about getting full ROI out of the licensing costs and how to measure that in terms of reporting to management. Almost all the attendees agreed that an ROI calculation that was internally built and agreed upon was important, but achieving a single view of the customer was what many deemed the real ROI. This singular objective has proven to increase referrals and improve the banks customers experience at the same time- both value the banks could attest to. 

Key Takeaway: Other adoption ideas included leveraging Chatter. One bank shared how they built their core values into Chatter using hash tags (topics). Employees would share customer interactions and wins and tag them with one of the five core values of the bank. Adoption was pushed even further with the release of the Salesforce1 Mobile App. Now every employee of the bank can share referrals and communicate with other departments right from their phone. 

About the author

Jason Atwood is the COO and Co-Founder of Arkus, a Salesforce implementation partner specializing in Financial Services. He is also the co-leader of the Community Bank User Group in the Salesforce Success Community. Find him on Twitter @JasonMAtwood.

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