The key to a bank’s success may be rooted in its ability to deliver positive experiences to its customers. According to McKinsey, more than 70% of senior banking executives rank customer experience as a top priority over the coming years. Companies that effectively organize and manage customer experience can realize:
- 20% improvement in customer satisfaction
- 15% increase in sales conversion
- 30% lower cost-to-serve
- 30% increase in employee engagement
But while financial services organizations may realize the advantages of a positive customer experience, many need to catch up in launching improvements to deliver on that goal, with fewer than half of banking leaders considering their organizations to have a high level of customer experience maturity.
Here we share how banks and credit unions can focus on cultivating a compelling customer experience by leveraging Salesforce to create a welcoming feeling — starting at the digital front door.
What is a digital front door?
In the past, a customer would enter a bank’s front door and walk up to a teller who would handle all their banking needs. But with more and more consumers moving to digital banking, the placement of a bank’s front door has shifted from the branch location to the screen of a computer or mobile device.
In financial services, the front door is more digital than ever before. Most of a customer’s needs, such as making a deposit or submitting a loan application, can be done on a bank or credit union’s website or app.
Meeting all those needs in a digital environment also leads to a customer pain point. Many banks were built on a variety of systems that require different customer logins. For example, systems for lending, wealth, and deposits could require separate logins. And suddenly, a digital banking platform meant to offer convenience is a source of endless customer confusion and frustration.
It’s like walking in the digital front door, and customers aren’t sure which direction to go or how to get there. Whereas in the days past, customers would walk into a branch and have easy access to all their needs via one person.
For banks and credit unions, fragmentation and inconsistency have become extremely common within the digital experiences, giving the upper hand to larger banks who have the budget to create one large custom front end. Whereas, others are looking to consolidate with one vendor to “do it all” for their customer digital experience. Creating a balancing act of best-of-bread back-end systems vs. a great user experience.
The goal should be to create one customer digital front door on the front end that is powered by connected best-of-breed systems on the back end. This decouples the system for retail lending, commercial deposits, wealth management, etc. from the digital customer experience of that vendor, providing the ability to upgrade the digital experience without having to replace all systems at once. Customers should have one login to enter that digital front door that gives them admittance to all the bank’s products and services, leading to a better overall customer experience.
How can Salesforce Experience Cloud create better customer experiences?
Salesforce Experience Cloud is a very powerful front-end experience platform built natively atop the Salesforce platform. Experience Cloud provides all the flexibility in design and user experience, while also capitalizing on the data model created around the customer profile. The native connection to Salesforce, along with the fully open flexibility of data integration, provides a unique ability to center experiences around the customer account.
Because Experience Cloud is a low/no-code platform developed on the Salesforce platform, it can be expected that implementation is much more affordable and effective, providing that custom digital front door ability to banks and credit unions who can’t afford a large development team like the larger banks. Salesforce Experience Cloud provides a customer-facing digital experience that gives your members, customers, or clients an authentic digital front door.
Salesforce Experience Cloud offers many capabilities, including:
- Chat: Use chat to answer customer inquiries with messages tied to the customer’s account record to track activity and responses given.
- Submitting a case: Link a customer’s issue with the customer’s account record and gain visibility across the customer’s entire experience.
- Servicing for onboarding and origination: Silverline has built a Digital Account Opening Accelerator that works with Salesforce Experience Cloud to provide a fully automated end-to-end digital account opening workflow. The Accelerator speeds up response time and reduces customer friction points.
- Secure document exchange: Customers can easily and securely pass information back and forth with the bank, such as income statements or identification, with Salesforce Experience Cloud’s logged-in, authenticated portal.
- Knowledge sharing: Showcase helpful content to your customers that align with their interests in a bank’s specific products and services.
- Seamless API connectivity to legacy systems those already connected to the Salesforce platform.
How can Silverline help banks with designing a customer experience?
The benefit of Salesforce Experience Cloud is that a bank is not limited by the design and UI of its various vendors, which likely cannot be changed. A bank can maintain control of its digital experience, ensure the design matches its branding, and deliver a seamless front-end customer experience.
Silverline has an experience design team that develops customized experiences for its financial services industry clients. The team is knowledgeable about using UI and UX to design personas and journeys that create a beneficial user experience every time a customer enters a bank’s digital front door.
Silverline recently worked with a community-based bank that wanted to build automated workflows to speed up its loan and deposit origination system so it could deliver an omnichannel customer experience.
Silverline implemented Salesforce Experience Cloud and OmniStudio to provide a seamless experience for the bank’s customers to originate loans, lines of credit, and deposits in one transaction. Applicants are now able to apply, choose multiple products to originate, review and sign agreements and disclosures, and upload secure verification documents.
