Skip To Content
Back to Blog

On Strategy, and the Business of Building a Connected Experience

By 10.08.20
Reading time: 5 minutes

This is part two in a series on Connected Experiences for Banks and Credit Unions. Be sure to check out part one.

A CRM system accomplishes the ultimate goal of better understanding, engaging, and retaining current and prospective customers, as well as current and prospective team members.

To get buy-in from all levels, it’s best to build out high-level organization goals and objectives — and a roadmap that details why and how a CRM would benefit the company as a whole.

Strategic information gathering

That means you’ll be spending time with all of your internal groups to document their current state and their ideal one. This is more than a team hierarchy chart, a systems list, or reports. This is listening to your subject matter experts (SMEs)  about their processes, tools that complement or add friction to those processes, and metrics. You need to understand how each person, team, and process is impacting the business. 

These impacts could be financial or cultural. While you are conducting this discovery it is critical to define your strategy. Why are you asking these questions?. The groups you are engaging with need to understand the  impact it will have on their roles and their clients. Setting the “why” ahead of time goes a long way to getting the information you need. You also need to build trust with your business partner (consultant or internal team) by demonstrating you understand how each group contributes to the ideal customer experience. 

Let business objectives guide your success formula

Once you know for certain that Salesforce is right for you, your team, and your business — you need to convince everyone else. 

Especially leadership and executive teams. 

That’s where your conversations with SMEs come into play. Once you’ve spoken with your SMEs, every good business decision comes backed with proper use cases for how it will result in improvements for company assets, also known as — you guessed it — people, processes, and technology. Addressing these three pillars from both an internal and external viewpoint almost guarantees buy-in from decision makers and key stakeholders. And change management becomes infinitely easier when the “why” is communicated strongly before implementing anything new.

What are some common objectives to look for and tailor to your company’s current state and needs? We thought you’d never ask.

Objective: Defining and tracking KPIs

Identify what you know and what you want to know as it relates to processes, procedures, and protocols. Defining program and product success for your business by asking yourself and your SMEs the following:

  • How do we define “quality relationships” and what do we use to measure their success?
  • How do we show collaboration, adoption, or process improvement?
  • Which activities should we automate based on process flows?
  • Do we track and monitor requests, such as marketing queries, to better understand what branches need, and how best to facilitate proper collateral?
  • How can we drive a retention program to increase loyalty?
  • How can we remove friction while onboarding clients we just acquired through a merger or acquisition?

All of this and more can be accomplished with a CRM customized to your branch’s unique needs and specifications.

Objective: Cutting costs

Always a crowd pleaser, saving money is the way to any savvy businessperson’s heart. Salesforce can help you:

  • Streamline processes
  • Kill your spreadsheets — automating manual tasks means less time spent on administrative duties and more time spent on customer-centric work
  • Eliminate point solutions by leveraging the platform to support processes and workflows (referral management, pipeline management, case management, complaints management, contract management, digital marketing, print marketing, and event management, to name a few)
  • Optimize your workforce by removing the need for third-party agencies (marketing agencies, for example)
  • Execute more programs with less staff

Objective: Improving efficiency ratios

The only thing better than saving money, is saving time. Does your organization drive new business with a team or tech stack that’s as lean as possible? How will a CRM improve your efficiency ratio?

Get quality relationships with the support of

  • Online appointment scheduling
  • Digital engagement tools (cross-channel capabilities)
  • Online Account Opening

Grow accounts by optimizing:

  • Client 360. Consolidate all the possible ways your customers and members have to manage their relationship with you. For example, don’t force a login for all of your point solutions. Find a way to make it easy for users to authenticate seamlessly and expand their relationship with you.
  • Marketing campaigns. Track and manage your client and prospect campaigns. 
    • How are they performing overall?
    • Which channels are your best performers? 
    • What segments are the most engaged and where? 
    • Are you communicating to all clients the same way?
    • How are you delivering personalization? 
    • How does your front-line staff interact with planned campaigns?
    • How are they informing new campaigns? 
  • Client interaction. Eliminate friction in online channel interactions for faster, easier use in day-to-day transactions or asset management. Consolidate your view of customer for staff to drive more satisfactory, fully integrated experiences
  • AI integration. Marketing automation provides insights to help drive growth with solutions like Next Best Action. Einstein Analytics enables chatbots for online customer queries

Objective: Clear communication

When people can easily understand the processes required for using tools, less mistakes are made — and tasks become less time consuming.

Salesforce clears things up, letting your teams:

  • Intelligently route communications to the appropriate areas
  • Adhere to standards across all account types and requests
  • Phase out rules or exceptions for legacy account types or specific associates
  • Eliminate friction for internal team and customers

Objective: Retention and relationship deepening

Customers and members look to branch and contact center employees to be experts. How can you empower your team to provide superior quality service that ensures quality accounts not only stay, but grow? With Salesforce, you can:

Provide workshops 

Take the time to train your team on new technology, tools, and solutions so they can spend more time solving customer problems than searching for functionalities. By focusing on the process as much as what new buttons to click, so that when it comes time for client interaction the team is ready to multitask

Improve onboarding

Your customers want to know that you can help them every step of the way. An easy way to align customers and team member experience is to encourage employees to open an account themselves. You can craft and track an employee onboarding campaign designed to get more employees to bank where they work. When the service you provide is the service you would receive, engagement and pride in work increases

Build a rapport

  • Automate follow-ups and assessments after an interaction or specific period of time has passed between contact with a customer or prospect. Make sure they know that they are a priority to your business.
  • Track and improve customer satisfaction scores: What are you measuring and how often? What are the action plans after you collect the data?
  • Establish customer profiles, surface relevant data to the front-lines, and coach staff on the proper conversations

Once you understand how each person, team, and process impacts the business, you can shift your focus to your customer needs. With a united team of SMEs and executives on board — it’s time to think about growing your customer base.

Get your copy of our Connected Experiences Playbook for Banks and Credit Unions today.

ebook: Structuring connected experiences for banks and credit unions

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.