How CRM helps financial services firms overcome their biggest challenges

If your financial services organization wants to be resilient in the face of economic uncertainty, rising customer expectations and continued labor shortages, then you need to focus on process optimization. Leveraging technology to remove friction for employees and customers will result in increased productivity and provide a competitive advantage in any environment.

The right CRM design and implementation is a key component to gaining efficiencies across your organization. CRM integrates multiple systems, creating a single source of truth for customer knowledge. It can then use the data to provide actionable insights for your employees that help them step customers through the right process or offer the best solution for their financial health.

Here are three ways CRM in financial services can help your organization stay resilient:

1. Increase productivity and returns during economic uncertainty

Given today’s rate environment and the need for increasing deposits, efficiency gains are key.

CRM helps by giving you the data to ensure that you’re putting your effort into the right areas. It helps you be more strategic by tracking your investments from the lead all the way to your close. This data allows you to divert your funds to areas that are driving the most growth.

Increasing productivity

CRM should be used to unify data from multiple systems, resulting in an engagement layer where employees don’t have to do research in several systems or contact employees in other departments to get the information. This reduces friction for all parties involved, saving time for employees and creating a better customer experience.

It also helps optimize staffing by making it easier to quantify what activities employees are doing during the day and evaluate their productivity.

Using data to maximize returns

Using data from CRM, you can identify trends and gain customer insights for proactive, personalized outreach. It helps you better identify sales opportunities that you can use to create targeted marketing campaigns that will result in increased revenue and profitability.

And once you launch a campaign, it helps you understand which efforts are converting, so that you are putting money into channels that can produce results.

2. Meet rising customer expectations

Financial services organizations are used to facing a competitive environment. But added pressure from fintechs and economic uncertainty have made it even more important to reach new customers and grow your wallet share.

Customers want faster, easier access to information and more digital experience that incorporates multiple channels, blending the physical and the digital.

Knowing your customers

Customer experience is no longer one size fits all. Your customers expect your organization to know who they are and what they want at the right time.

CRM enables you to have greater insight into each customer by analyzing data from multiple sources. It can take their activities and provide you with service and product suggestions that are specific to them and their financial wellness journey.

It also unifies information, making it easier for a one call resolution for questions or complaints. With CRM, the information is available in one place, removing the need to transfer the customer or waste time duplicating efforts. And customers won’t have to repeat their problem or questions.

Omni-channel communication

CRM can help give your customers fast, omni-channel access, enabling them to communicate in a way that’s important to them. With CRM, a customer can start an activity on their phone and pick up where they left off on their laptop the following evening, creating a seamless experience. Customers must feel that they can call or send a chat with their financial services organization and have all the communication channels in sync.

3.  Manage staffing

Labor shortages are creating issues for every industry, including financial services. A CRM can help give your organization a competitive advantage when it comes to recruiting and training talent.

Simplify onboarding

CRM can create workflows and processes for an effective onboarding experience, enabling new team members to get up to speed and operating faster, especially for entry-level positions with high turnover. It simplifies onboarding by making it easier for everyone to access information and understand the systems required to serve customers and complete work. 

CRM also standardizes processes across teams and departments so that when you bring in new staff, they can access information and see processes on a single platform. They don’t have to play catch-up, trying to learn multiple systems just to complete one task.

Better prospects for recruitment

CRM makes a good recruiting tool because it shows potential staff that you have the technology in place to remove friction from their job.

This is especially important for younger generation workers such as millennials, Gen Z and even the upcoming Gen Alpha, who have been raised with the latest technology. Frontline employees, such as branch staff or call center representatives, are typically recent college graduates who don’t want to use legacy systems and Excel sheets when better alternatives are available.

You can leverage CRM with new hires by showing them that your organization has the right systems and processes in place to help them be at their best and successful in their roles.

Retain knowledge

With CRM, if a key individual leaves, they won’t be taking all their knowledge with them. An organization that follows CRM best practices will capture that knowledge about key customers, allowing anyone taking over that role will be able to preserve and grow those relationships.

This is particularly helpful for teams that manage commercial portfolios or high-net-worth individuals. 

Fill gaps

If you’re facing high turnover or are simply unable to staff certain positions, consider using CRM to help you fill those gaps.

CRM gives you visibility and tracking to identify where you can be more efficient, reducing the impact that gaps in your staffing have on your organization. You can retool your automation and workflows so that there’s less burden, and you can focus on your more urgent staffing needs.

How Wipfli can help

Let Wipfli help your financial services organization get started with our accelerated CRM implementation services. We leverage our experience with CRM and technology to help your organization implement solutions faster, and we can provide you with ongoing support and recommendations. 

Contact us today to learn how we can help you maximize your CRM.

This article is part of our series on how your financial services organization can use technology to build resilience. We cover the latest technologies and strategies to improve efficiency, engage customers and increase revenue in any economic conditions.

Sign up to receive more financial services industry content in your inbox or continue reading from our series:

• The importance of understanding risk and resilience
• Benefits of building resilience in the workplace
• Digital transformation for financial services
• How to keep improving with AI in financial services
• Data and analytics for financial services
• Strategies for customer retention in financial services
• Four investments to recession-proof your business