How Salesforce Can Support Banks In Growing Their Customers?

In a digital economy, traditional banking models are moving towards operating as an ecosystem instead of just running a bank. Earlier, a bank would operate in silos through physical stores being the face of the business. However, the digital-driven world has multiple customer touch points being catered by fintech competitors. Therefore, banks need to serve customers in non-traditional ways and engage with them throughout their major life moments. Customer Relationship Management is a crucial tool that can help banks to engage with customers seamlessly.

How does Salesforce help businesses transform?

The Salesforce platform is a bouquet of cloud-based capabilities which can enable banking institutions with sales and marketing, customer service, collaboration and communities, analytics, and business intelligence services in an automated and intuitive manner. It provides three transitional elements to move towards the ecosystem model in order to provide a competitive advantage to banking institutions.

Firstly, it offers a 360-degree customer view to banks enabling them to not only view their customer information but that of their partners as well.

Secondly, Salesforce cloud provides augmented data intelligence to banks to utilise the heaps of digital data accessible to them. It combs through customer information and other data to give banks precious insights into customer behaviour and current trends. This helps serve customers better as banks can add more value to the customer’s journey. With Salesforce, banks can create a customer-centric business model that can engage with customers and offer them relevant products and services.

Finally, Salesforce, with its agility and flexibility brings a plug-and-play model to the table. With the evolution of the banking industry, Salesforce can adapt to the growing needs of the banks because it has an open and cloud-based technology platform.

How has Salesforce adoption helped banks in growing their customers?

Many banking institutions have sought the assistance of Salesforce to transform into the ecosystem model. Let us look at some winning stories –

Commonwealth bank of Australia

The Commonwealth Bank of Australia used Salesforce CRM platform to transform itself into a socially connected entity. Salesforce supported its digital marketing strategy by integrating Facebook and other social media networks on to the platform. This allowed the bank to be a part of customers’ social conversations and service them at consumer touchpoints. The bank also enabled its employees with Salesforce’s internal social network Chatter to collaborate with each other, share files, and update statuses.

Salesforce enables the bank to listen to social media conversations and analyse them for understanding what people are saying about the Commonwealth Bank. The platform uses technologies such as machine learning and image recognition to gather intelligence which is helpful in creating relevant content and marketing campaigns for the brand. Also, by understanding consumer pain points, the company can tune into their sentiment and service them better. Similarly, a positive social media presence helps them garner eyeballs and generate more leads.

US Bank

One of the largest banks in the USA, US Bank is a Fortune 500 company and provides banking and financial services to individuals and organizations. In a strategic effort to unify its customer experience, the company decides to adopt a ‘one bank’ approach. Salesforce helped them eliminating the silos between their business units and treating them as a single entity. To do so, they built the Customer 360 platform which provides all the units of US Bank with single and unified access to the customer database. This 720-degree unified view of its customers across the company and its partners, has enabled the bank to understand their customers and serve them better across all touch points.

Janalakshmi Financial Services

As India’s largest microfinancing company, Janalakshmi provides small loans to the poorest poor. The company decided to expand its footprint further and aimed to launch its banking business along with a host of financial services. To do so, they invested in Salesforce CRM before launching its full suite of new products and services.

The Salesforce platform helped the bank integrate its process and make it scalable. This led to a reduction in the time-to-market for its products and services. The Salesforce-driven simplified onboarding process has reduced the time taken to disburse loans by half. The company’s core strength lies in the 10,000 plus field representatives who provide door-step financial inclusion services to customers. The representatives have a customised mobile app on their smartphones which is connected with the company’s core banking system. This makes it possible for the representatives to serve customers at their doorstep. The biometric function built into the mobile app helps them verify customers and their transactions on the spot. The central team can track these transactions with Salesforce’s reliable reporting systems. The insights and efficiency brought in with the use of Salesforce has allowed them to increase their footprint, enhance service and achieve an impressive 100% year-on-year growth.

Salesforce partners with many credible partners to provide a customised CRM platform to businesses. One of them is Manras Technologies. Operating out of Zirakpur and Gurugram, Manras Technologies is a Gold Salesforce consulting partner that provides customised Salesforce implementation services to banking and financial institutions of all sizes. In the last 5 years, Manras Technologies has proved to be a formidable player in the field of Salesforce implementation and has provided strategic guidance and technical support to businesses wanting to transform themselves for long-term success. Their tailored solutions have resulted in higher business visibility, better customer insights, improved processes, and greater productivity for their clients.

Modern banking institutions rely on the Salesforce platform to achieve several transformational objectives. Be it financial services augmentation, improvement in marketing leads conversions or making sense of data, with the Salesforce platform, a banking institution can minimise the wastage of time and resources while improving the efficiency of their ecosystem. As a global CRM leader, Salesforce empowers banking institutions across the world to reach out to more customers while retaining their existing base.