5 Benefits of CRM in Banking

Ranjit Rajan George
3 min readJan 27, 2017

--

Image Credit: Chicago Insurance Online

Banks can either be a hulking elephant (slow to move) or a nimble titan (quick movement with powerful impact). A CRM solution helps a bank to be later.

Customer Relationship Management is a business strategy aimed at acquiring new customers, retaining the current ones and to increase the competitive advantages of a bank. It does so by preserving and enhancing the business relationships between the bank and its customers. CRM for banks help in improving the long-term profitability of the firm as it moves away from a product-centric marketing to a customer-centric one.

So let us go into the five benefits one by one.

1. Better customer service
Customers today want short and decisive action on their problems. A great customer service leaves a great first impression. Every engagement a customer has while solving his issues, be it multi channel via phone, email or web is personalized with the help of CRM for banks. It helps to collect, prioritize and allocate resources to solve service requests logged by customers. This enhances the service and reduces the response time for the resolution, thereby increasing overall productivity.

2. Better customer retention
Every interaction and transaction is captured by the CRM solutions. These help to improve the bank’s knowledge of its customers. This helps improve the efficiency of their operations, services and minimize wastage. The personalized services that the bank is able to offer help it to respond to customer needs in real time. By surprising the customers by empathizing and providing the right services at the right time, the bank creates a high value goodwill that translates to margins.

3. New revenue opportunities through segmentation
Repeatedly excelling in the same sales channel will not make a bank richer. CRM solutions help you to segment customers based on their purchases, demographics, psycho-graphics and behavioral characteristics. This process helps you to classify customers according to attributes like frequency, characteristics etc. With this, banks can increase cross selling numbers for products like loans, wealth management, insurance etc. It is known fact that 3O% of customers contribute to more than 70% of the sales. And they are usually high net-worth individuals. Retain them and you have the much needed business security. CRM software makes it possible for a bank to get closest to a customer’s wallet when the competition intensifies.

4. Improving customer profile intelligence
Getting a comprehensive customer 360 degree overview will help you answer the question of “Who is my million dollar customer?”. Multi channel information gathered in a centralized repository and instantly available in a click will do wonders for customizing client interactions as well. Be aware that 3O % of customers contribute to more than 70 % of the sales. And they are usually high net-worth individuals. Keeping them happy is essential

5. Instant fulfillment through multi-channel integration
The range of customer’s channel choice is changing thus a need for an efficient CRM with a multi-channel environment. Technology, customer potential, and competition forces a bank for multi-channel integration to design a service journey to guarantee instant fulfillment. For example, approving loans in 3 minutes instead of 3 days. This helps develop the business strategy and value-creation processes leading to acquisition, extension, and retention of customers.

These are the five distinct advantages of CRM in Banking. Do you have any other benefits to share?

--

--