Last year, Salesforce reported that a quarter of global financial services customers switched banks, and more than a third switched their insurers and wealth managers. When investigating why, they discovered the primary reasons were poor customer service and ineffective digital experiences.

Today, customers want more from their financial services institutions (FSIs). They demand slick, holistic and convenient digital experiences – accessible across all touchpoints – and they’re looking to their providers for personalized support, advice, and guidance, especially during uncertain economic times.  

In tandem with better digital experiences, customers also don’t want service providers to lose the human touch. They need to know they can approach customer support with a query and receive a timely and tailored answer — no matter whether it’s over the phone or in person.

To meet these ever-rising expectations, it's critical that financial services providers like yours deliver on human-centric and personalized digital services that work to strengthen customer relationships and, most importantly, retain clients.

In this blog, we explore how implementing Salesforce alongside a digital enablement expert can help your financial institution achieve this.

4 ways Salesforce can improve your client relationships

1. Standardize customer journeys and processes

Forty-four percent of global consumers aged 18-44 find it difficult to get human support from their financial institutions. And even when they can, their requests often take too long. This can cause needless frustration for your clients, as they may end up wondering whether their request has fallen by the wayside.

In many cases, this problem is a result of inconsistent manual processes that lack transparency, such as physical paper processes or unstandardized email chains.

By building automated workflows using Salesforce capabilities, such as Flow, your teams can follow a more efficient approach.  

Flow enables you to design, test and deploy low-code and automated customer request triggers. Once triggered, these requests are automatically assigned to the appropriate service team, who is notified to complete the next step of the process, whether it’s creating an application form or requesting an ID check.

To ensure these requests are fulfilled in a timely manner and without error, Flow lets you prioritize certain queues or types of customers, as well as monitor bottlenecks in the workflow. The result? You can cut down lengthy requests and applications from weeks to a few days or less. And with each automation you implement, you're able to track and report on performance metrics, meaning you can use data to improve the efficiency of your automations and continuously speed up customer response times.

These workflows also have the added benefit of allowing you to onboard and train new employees faster. This can help boost employee productivity and reduce dependency on “institutional knowledge” to get work done.  

2. Deliver proactive and automatic client updates

Only 48 percent of FSI customers and members say their institution proactively communicates with them.

This can be frustrating for your clients, especially when they’re anticipating confirmation or status updates. If you don’t provide this proactive follow-up, they may feel the need to ask for updates themselves. Even if they don’t, they’ll end up merely hoping for the best — and that’s never a good foundation for a relationship.

The good news is that reaching out to your existing and new clients need not be difficult. In Salesforce Marketing Cloud, you can set certain events to trigger automatic notifications and updates via email or SMS. For instance, when requesting a new credit card, a customer may receive a series of personalized emails, including:

• Confirmation of their application
• A welcome email and starter pack
• Card shipment updates
• Step-by-step card activation and mobile wallet advice
• Tips on how to use the mobile app

You can use helpful templates to generate these emails, reducing the time and effort required by your customer service and marketing teams.

3. Convey the right messages using up-to-date user profiles

Your clients expect a seamless experience when requesting a service or making a complaint. The advice they receive on an online chat pop-up should be the same as the advice they receive in-branch.

However, it’s difficult for your customer service teams to deliver the right advice, ensure a seamless experience, and build relationships with clients if your data is inaccessible and lives in disjointed “data silos”. To provide the best experiences to your clients, you must break down these silos, provide a consolidated view of client data, and maintain a single source of truth.

The Salesforce Data Cloud does precisely that. It gathers all your cross-department customer data into one harmonized, real-time user profile. This gives every department the data they need to fast-track applications, source information quickly, and ensure clients receive a holistic experience no matter who they talk to.

4. Personalized client experiences

Approximately 70 percent of global banking consumers desire personalized financial advice. Yet only 26 percent of these consumers are satisfied with the levels of personalization on their digital banking tools.

If you wish to strengthen your client relationships, you must deliver on these expectations. Otherwise, your clients may seek better digital experiences elsewhere.

Fortunately, it’s easy to facilitate personalization within Salesforce. Using event triggers and intelligent customer data, you can deliver recommendations or advice based on client engagements. For instance, a client that provides you with new address information after changing apartments may be a candidate for updated contents insurance coverage.

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Make the most of your Salesforce investment with Modes

Customer expectations are changing — and that means your organization must, too. To strengthen client relationships and deliver superior experiences, you need to streamline your processes and harmonize your customer data.  

Doing this has a direct benefit to your overall client experience, which can help you generate what Accenture call “a multiplier effect." This is where banks maximize the power of their relationships to achieve top-line growth. According to their report, the “multiplier effect” can help banks increase revenues from primary customers by up to 20 percent, depending on the market. In the US, this translates to $100B in annual retail banking revenue at stake.

Salesforce empowers your financial services institution to create a complete picture of your customers and members and deliver fast, personalized experiences. But, like any technology investment, it’s not an overnight fix.

To make the most of the platform, you need to adopt a strategic approach, tailored to your unique business needs. This means identifying quick wins, plotting out longer implementations, and ensuring your workforce keeps pace with an ever-changing landscape of technological advancements, including generative AI tools and machine learning.  

If this is something your financial services organization needs help with, we’d suggest reaching out to the right co-creator to guide your efforts. And that’s where we come in. At Modes, we help you strategize, design, and implement Salesforce solutions that make your clients’ lives better. If you’d like to find out more, please get in touch with our team.