The last few months have certainly strained industries across the map — shining light on ability and inability to adapt, scale, and meet changing demands from consumers and employees alike. Likewise, businesses have found that they need solutions that extend beyond CRM.
For financial institutions, the changing requirements for the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) and related processes pushed some institutions to new boundaries in what it means to be an ally. Many of these institutions have always prided themselves on being local and interacting face-to-face with their customers — and are now navigating how to also identify their success and their clients’ success and satisfaction with reliable digital channels for engagement and relationship expansion.
More than just a sales resource
In the same amount of time, Silverline has shared new, improved, and improvised use cases for leveraging Salesforce beyond CRM. We all know that the Salesforce platform provides efficiency and value throughout financial institutions when it comes to CRM needs. Most organizations start with CRM and quickly realize the additional functionality and capability that the platform can support: Service Cases, Chat & Chatbots, Customer Communities, Operational Workflow, Marketing Automation, Risk and Compliance.
All of these groups engage with clients in one way or another. The truly client-focused organizations understand all of those touch points and drive collaboration around the client by sharing insights with their associates that enable meaningful interactions.
From Marketing emails to branch visits, website clicks to service cases, online banking logins to customer complaints, Salesforce can provide a powerful toolset to tie it all together.
Going beyond CRM: Salesforce in action
Silverline client, Academy Bank, leveraged Salesforce in a time of crisis to provide a scalable Salesforce App (built in just five hours!) that was used internally to track and support the Paycheck Protection Program. Their story, as told on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, highlights the platform’s power to support a myriad of use cases once you invest in establishing the platform’s foundation and empowering your Salesforce Admins to solve business challenges.
Baxter Credit Union also quickly leveraged their existing Salesforce foundation to tackle Covid-related issues head on as they arose. Working with Silverline, BCU built a repository of featured Knowledge articles to support Covid-19 FAQs, along with a Chatbot powered by Einstein technology that allowed visitors to fulfill their request, chat with a service rep, or schedule a call back.
John Sahagian, BCU’s Chief Data Officer said, “within 30 days of having the functionality in place, we fielded over 3,000 chats and saw about 15% of those flow through to a live agent.” Daily average chat totals continue to climb and BCU receives an average of over 200 chats per day. This quick initiative enabled BCU to serve more member needs faster, providing the equivalent support of three additional full-time employees.
Other clients focused more on communication by optimizing their Pardot or Marketing Cloud implementations to support proactive COVID messaging as well as stage and status messaging to provide updates for Cases, Applications and Forbearance or Hardship requests.
What else can Salesforce do for you?
The above examples are just a few of the ways that Salesforce proves it is more than a CRM and shows the often unlocked potential you can tap into to drive value for your organization. When you focus on the experience (clients and associates) and examine the tools available, Salesforce provides an amazing toolset to support your ideal client experience.
Now is the time to evaluate your current processes and find ways to streamline interactions that are customer and associate facing to reduce friction and improve efficiency. While that might seem like a big ask, we’re more than willing to help bring your Salesforce Org into its next phase and beyond. When you’re ready, we’ll be here. Reach out.
