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It’s no secret that today’s banks face a tidal wave of strategic challenges. Perhaps one of the most pressing is the need to develop a more personal, comprehensive profile of the customer.
Banks must embrace this disruption or become a victim of it.
Disruptive new technologies are enabling businesses across all industries to deliver delightfully effortless customer-centric experiences. A recent three-year study indicates that by 2025, millennials will represent as much as 75% of the workforce, and about 73% of millennials would be ‘more excited’ about a new financial services offering from Google, Amazon, Apple, Paypal or Square than from a traditional bank. If banks are going to keep up with the higher standards expected by millennials, they must embrace this disruption or become a victim of it. We’ve listed 5 tech strategies to help banks navigate the change that is necessary to bring customers into focus.
Unfortunately, fragmented incentive structures and organizational silos currently present major obstacles to successfully capturing and converting leads. A recent study showed that 63% of customer leads are either lost or not followed up on (Forbes Secret Shopper Study of 10,000 Companies, 2012).
Banks can get past these barriers by: 1) aligning incentives to business outcomes rather than digitally recorded activities and 2) setting and reinforcing new expectations about collaboration across all lines of business.
Aligning incentives to outcomes means compensating internal sales representatives based on positive business outcomes as opposed to simply tying compensation to lead and referral generation. Without a unified view for managing and rerouting relevant data, these referrals too often fail to result in successful handoffs between employees in different lines of business.
Using the cloud, banks can dismantle silos to achieve collaboration across the entire organization and reinvent the incentive structure to drive collaboration.
Employees are a bank’s greatest asset in engaging the customer, and they need to be empowered to go mobile and make essential information self-service.
As mobile devices increasingly become ‘life’s dashboard’, employees should be able to access up to date information relevant to a sale whenever and wherever they need it. Easy access to this information, whether for scheduling or creating more holistic customer profiles, will be vital to banks seeking to create vibrant and effective customer experiences.
Engagement means motivating deeper customer engagement through social rewards and status for employees. Many firms lack the best tools available for them to easily coach and incentivize their teams. Currently, 40% of sales representatives leave within the first 12 months, and 67% miss their quotas (Nucleus Research Study, 2013).
Together with loyalty and incentive programs, adopting sales performance management tools can accelerate onboarding by 50 to 75% and increase close rates by as much as 10 to 15% (BCG Perspectives: Operational Excellence in Retail Banking, 2014). Using tools like Work.com, banks can energize and engage their greatest assets, their employees.
Evolve! Banks should let their IT departments be heroes and unleash their business analysts by empowering them to become business developers. The Salesforce platform offers one way of enabling business users and IT to implement applications at the speed of now.
With point-and-click development tools comfortable to any business user familiar with spreadsheets, a non-developer can use Salesforce to easily whip up sophisticated apps, reports and dashboards that are automatically updated with clean and current data. Since it all lives on the same platform, developers can continue to develop new services and integrations for non-developers to draw into new apps using clicks, not code.
It all comes down to creating 1:1 experiences for the customer by personalizing interactions to the needs of the individual.
Banks that focus on customer experience are known to achieve 30% increase in income per customer (McKinsey, Banking on Customer Centricity, 2012). By executing on the strategies outlined above, banks can take significant steps toward reinventing customer and employee experiences and shred their competition.
How do we know this? As the world’s most innovative company for four years running, we’ve helped over 8,000 financial services customers transform their businesses. Armed with insights gained through our unique customer success model and collaboration with our strategic partners, we are also building out deep and powerful solutions tailored to the financial services industry.
As a ‘bank for banks’, we consider the protection of customers’ private data our highest value. Learn more about our industry-leading security practices.
Visit salesforce.com for more of our innovative solutions, or download the free e-book below.
