The Ultimate Guide to Banking CRM – Choosing the Right Responsive Composable Solution

Customer relationships are the bread and butter of any business.

Developing an amazing product is in itself a herculean task. Finding, serving and delighting customers may seem to be an impossible mission. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) makes it possible and easier for businesses. It’s not for nothing than the Customer is King.

What Is CRM?

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) as the name suggests is a tool that helps businesses in managing the interaction with existing and potential customers. It allows companies to be more efficient by interacting with customer data, real-time reports, analysis, sales growth, boosting profits, etc.

Benefits of CRM

A CRM system offers numerous advantages to businesses:

• A comprehensive, 360-degree view of the customer.
• Extraction of customer intelligence from raw data.
• Utilization of insights for personalized sales and service.
• Precise customer segmentation.
• The power to launch targeted marketing campaigns.
• Elimination of departmental silos, streamlining operations.
• Use of analytics to comprehend customer preferences and anticipate trends.
• Facilitation of informed decision-making.

What are the different types of CRM systems?

A Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system is used by companies to foster long lasting customer relationships. Every company has different business goals and needs. There are hundreds of CRM companies offering CRM software based on these needs.
Broadly there are three types of CRM available-
1. Operational
2. Analytical
3. Collaborative

1. Operational CRM

Operational CRM streamlines processes, focusing on marketing and sales automation. It keeps track of leads and centralizes all existing customer data. This enables the automation of lead management activities and the assignment of tasks to sales teams based on customer interactions. Marketing teams can create personalized email campaigns, track their effectiveness, and enhance campaign performance. Operational CRM also improves customer service through self-service options, knowledge bases, and automated chatbots.

Benefits

– Enhances internal communication

– Boosts customer satisfaction

– Improves marketing processes

– Maximizes return on investment

2. Analytical CRM

Analytical CRM utilizes a centralized database containing data from various sources, including customer data, lead sources and status, customer retention rates, product/service sales, and financial information. It helps companies analyze this data to make informed decisions for further business enhancement. Key features of analytical CRM include data mining, identifying cross-sell and upsell opportunities, creating detailed buyer personas, and accurate sales forecasting.

Benefits

– Identifies cross-selling and upselling opportunities

– Enhances customer satisfaction and loyalty

– Understands customer needs better

– Improves sales and revenue forecasting

3. Collaborative CRM

Collaborative CRM, also known as Strategic CRM, enables different teams (such as sales, marketing, and support) to share customer information. It focuses on improving customer service and enhancing the overall customer experience. Notable features of Collaborative CRM include interaction management, which keeps track of customer interactions across different touchpoints, and channel management, allowing businesses to serve customers on their preferred channels throughout the customer journey.

Benefits

– Improves channel interactions

– Reduces customer service costs

– Enhances cross-team communication

– Boosts customer loyalty and retention

Importance Of Customer Experience

Customer Experience is the interaction of a customer with your brand. It is formed on how a customer percept your company during all the stages of communication. Customers might be satisfied with your offering, but a poor sales process or service might worsen your overall impression.

For example, you might like pizza from X brand and used to order pizzas, each week, the quality of the pizza was at its peak but one day they delivered stale pizzas and you complain about it to their customer service. Now, this is a very critical time for any business, as you might get a 10/10 rating in one hundred deliveries but in one delivery if the customer complaints and the complaint is not resolved quickly, then you might lose the customer as there are several other businesses offering the same product/service in the market.

Ways in which CRM helps improve customer experience

So, how can a CRM help a business in improving its customer experience? Well, the answer is simple, know your customer’s behavior better than anyone else. A CRM allows you to get a holistic view of customer 360 which further allows you to create customized offers based on their interests, purchase history, intention, behavior, etc. Let’s see how a CRM can help a business in providing a better customer experience.

1. Creating personalized relations

A customer or prospect can interact with your business with any channel such as email, social media, phone, website, etc., and can contact any department such as sales, pre-sales, support, etc. So, a CRM allows you to capture all the conversation and give access to the same information to everyone for a better customer experience. E.g., if a customer interacts with your business the next time, you already know his name, personal details, last solved issues, etc.

2. Customized Offerings

To maximize conversions, a business needs to provide its customers a relevant product or service. A CRM allows you to know the recorded interaction of a customer, thus what he has bought, whether he was happy with the purchase or not, what problems they had, and how were they solved. With all of this knowledge, you can suggest to them the right offering based on their need.

3. Proactive customer support‘

A CRM enables your business to make sure that no complaints are lost, each complaint is processed in a central system that is accessed with the same information to all. Thus, you can set up email, WhatsApp, SMS, etc. responses to customers once you have received a complaint and also update your customer about his application process. Thus, providing the customer the satisfaction that his complaint is listed, listened to, and active at each level, provides a great sense of customer experience.

4. Handling Omnichannel requests

A CRM allows your business to always interact your business from multiple channels. Thus, a customer can connect with you from any channel, or you can add a new channel in the CRM for the interaction with the customer. This allows the customer to be always in touch with you and especially during the pandemic times when the most efficient means of communication is via digital channels, this comes very handily in providing an optimized customer experience.

Evaluating The Right CRM For Your Business

1. Create a cross functional team

The right CRM platform will influence all customer facing teams in your organization. All teams should be leveraged by setting up a cross functional team that will lead the evaluation process and coordinate implementation progress.

The team can be comprised of –
IT – For taking care of architecture, ongoing support, technology stack etc.
Finance – For taking care of cost, risk, vendor viability, ROI etc.
Business – For taking care of marketing, sales, service who will be using the platform everyday.
Privacy and Security – For taking care of customer data, GDPR compliance, etc.
The cross functional team will bring in a outside in perspective and deal with challenges that come up during the evaluation process.

2. Define and Prioritize CRM Objectives

Stakeholders should ask themselves, is choosing the right CRM about the best technical capabilities, or enhancing customer experience for competitive advantage or is it about digital business transformation. Clarity at the onset of the evaluation is critical for avoiding wasting time. Prioritize in case of multiple objectives. Structure your approach to include all stakeholders needed to discuss existing and needed capabilities.

3. Establish and Weight Criteria Evaluation

The cross functional team established in step 1 will assess the current business requirement for a CRM platform. Focus on the business objectives and an outside in approach by being in the shoes of a customer and taking care of their needs and expectations.

Instead of re-actively solving a problem, stakeholders can achieve business goals by approaching the design of the platform with an outside in perspective. This is where design thinking methodology comes into play. Stretch beyond the bounds of traditional problem solving and explore avenues for new opportunities. The next steps can be-

Identify criteria: Identify a top set of criteria representing key areas that can impact the path to achieve objectives. This will be primary Tier 1 criteria.

Divide into sub-criteria: Explore the underlying issues for each Tier 1 criteria and then divide the same into relevant sub-criteria. Start from generic and then progress to specific, till all the issues are addressed. This takes care of Tier 2, 3, 4 and subsequent criteria.

Craft detailed questionnaire: The right questions can go a long way in simplifying the journey to find the right CRM. Ask detailed questions for each criteria starting from research and then leading on scoring the prospective vendors and products. This will help to address increasingly specific concerns, concluding with questions for making assessments. The questions or capability analysis can be categorized into mandatory, valued and nice to have.

4. Create Selection Criteria and Set their Importance

The eight critical selection criteria are based on :
Functionality — Features that automate specific tasks or processes.
Usability — Adoption by teams or users to achieve dedicated business goals with effectiveness, efficiency and usage satisfaction.
Technology — Encompasses the overall architecture and underlying technology.
Cost — Investment needed to secure, train, and to the capabilities to use.
Consulting and implementation services — Expertise, resources and support infrastructure required to implement and maintain a deployment either from vendor or a implementation partner.
Speed — Time to go live. The faster the time, the better the ROI.
Risk — Vendor stability from a financial, organizational and market share perspective.
Vendor vision — Short-term and long term product roadmap and strategies.

The percentages will of the above 8 selection criteria will equal 100%. For instance, if functionality is given the weight of 20%, its importance is 20% of the final decision. The percentages can be modified by each organization based on requirements and expectations.

5. Create Hierarchical Sub-criteria and link it to CRM Attributes

It is important to define sub-criteria that support the underlying key areas for meeting the needs of the business. With this you can define the areas to evaluate within each criterion. The most important criteria lie within the application’s functionality. The sub-criteria can be further be granularly drilled down to functional process related to marketing, sales, customer service, digital commerce and field service.

If the business focus is sales, then the top priorities can be digital customer acquisition, sales enablement, social sales, sales analytics etc. Using a hierarchical model can help identify mandatory requirements and also enables stakeholders to narrow the list of prospective vendors.

6. Scoring the Vendors

Setting scores will help you to bring differentiation between vendors against earlier agreed upon criteria. This approach eliminates bias and brings in a factual approach. Below are a list of sample questions that can be used to demonstrate the applied creation and calculation of scoring model.

• Demonstrate data augmentation capabilities.
• Demonstrate contact duplication functionalities.
• Integration capabilities.
• Campaign capabilities with customer consent.
• Lead scoring models.
• Lead Management functionalities.
• Guided Selling capabilities.
• Digital Journey capabilities.
• Cloud capabilities without lock-ins and so on.

Evaluating too many vendors can get confusing. Limit consideration to those with proven domain expertise, good references and a great capability demonstration. By keeping the scoring simple, you can match the vendor capability with the cross functional team expectations. The above steps will help you kickstart your journey into a successful business transformation with the right CRM platform. A CRM provides better sales and marketing opportunities for any business by keeping the customer satisfied and reliable towards your product or service offerings. It improves your business efficiency and provides a better customer experience with the chance to improve as per the customer’s feedback.