The recent struggle for power between Fintech companies and banking institutions and innovation has resulted in the creation of banking CRMs. For this reason, banks have adopted a CRM approach to their banking services to look into the true importance of a customer-centric model based on a single view of the customer.

Banking CRMs are explicitly made to attend to the needs of the bank and other financial institutions. Business analysts expect the banking CRM development to grow considerably in the coming years. It helps to provide efficiency in the bank, making it easier for bank customer care reps to serve customers better.

The financial world is constantly changing, and banks and financial institutions have to move with the change.

In this article by Hanna Shnaider, you’ll understand the importance of a single customer view in banks, a customer-centric bank, and how a banking CRM system helps make this possible. You can check out her profile here.

Customer-centric features of banking CRMs

1. Customer dashboard with a 360-degree view: Banking institutions must have up-to-date customer information for better management. An effective banking CRM will help them gather data and view the financial history of the customers.

The banking institution can also get access to the general information of their customers through the help of banking CRMs. The software can also provide information on the financial status of the customers to the company.

2. Management of Contacts: Who would be interested in investing in a banking CRM without proper contact management? An accessible data of existing and new customers will help banks build internal communication, strengthening their external identity.
3. Reporting & Data Analytics: Banks can use the historical data of customers to handle the present transactions. It also helps to cut down on manual tasks, making banks pay their customers’ undivided attention.
4. Marketing Expertise: A banking CRM can quickly help banks connect to their customers. It can also help them have access to previous campaigns for better execution of the current marketing campaigns.
5. Workflow Automation: Customers can now easily access bank services, thanks to workflow automation. It can also flag changed data, such as when a customer inquires about a loan, making it easier for financial advisors to enhance their customers’ outreach.
6. Sales Management: No matter how the baking section is digitized, physical salespeople will always be available to interact with customers. Since the bank’s sales team will always be the first contact that a customer has with a bank, most times, they will record customers’ data.
7. Transactional data lets the software development company or banking institution know where and how their customers spend their money.

Here is a list of what the data shows:

• The customer’s spending preferences are according to the number of merchants visited.
• The type of purchases and their frequency include cash withdrawals. The data also shows the time of the preferred actions.
• The data shows the turnup rates of payments.
• This data can significantly benefit development companies, making it easier to figure out customers’ spending habits and payment patterns for cross-selling campaigns.

Besides acquiring customers’ personal information, a bank may also want to check the customers’ buying and behavior patterns to know more about customers’ financial personalities. To achieve this, they may need a particular set of information:

1. Customer life cycle information: This helps the banks quickly figure out customers’ life stages and match them to their required financial products.
2. Interaction history allows banks to see the frequency and content of the information passed by a customer on call centers and online-chat logs with inquiries. They also check the behavior of customers when in the bank’s mobile app or their company
3. The history of customers’ reaction to marketing campaigns: This helps the development companies to know if customers are interested in marketing campaigns beforehand, seeing the progress and the results of outreach activities.
4. Reliable social media information: Here, the company can quickly know customers’ likes and dislikes to adjust the custom products provided if possible. They can easily find out how customers quickly feel about a specific product.
5. Sales reps’ comments: This can include the best ways to deal with a specific customer.

Here are the benefits that many retail banks stand to offer when they use customer-centric CRM data sets.

1. Create a single information source about customers which all the different bank branches will use. It eases the stress and lengthy process that formerly needed to be followed to collect a customer’s information because banks can now easily share it across bank branches.
2. It will help to increase transparency and honesty between banking departments.
3. Figure out the most profitable customers and deal with them.
4. Create a set of rules and business processes with different customer segments. Since the company knows its customers well, it will be easier to draft out what they want.
5. Make customers’ journeys personalized in the company. They are more affiliated with the company.

Conclusion

One of the essential features of a customer-centric strategy is “Customer first.” It means that the customers’ needs must be one of the company’s priorities to have a customer-centric strategy. If the customers appear to agree to this approach, it will be for the betterment and growth of the company and the customers themselves. Our company, Fortyseven software professionals, is known to handle either custom or platform-based CRMs for business owners, banking institutions, and custom software development companies. Also, Banking CRM and customer-centric strategy help build a sense of understanding and loyalty among customers, creating life-long retention with them. Since development is inevitable itself, banking institutions and development companies would have to keep working hard to withstand the pressure from fintech fully.

It is the reason why the more information a bank collects from a customer means the more preferred products and services are provided for the customer. It means that a customers’ profile can serve as a centralized location of the bank’s knowledge and insights about the customers. Banking CRM is the starting point of this.