Digital-first customers dominate financial services — and they aren’t very satisfied.
While many consumers have become accustomed to conducting their financial transactions online due to the pandemic, bad experiences are still plaguing each Financial Services Institutions (FSI) sector, with insurance seeing more than one in three customers leave due to bad experiences, according to the Future of Financial Services Report by Salesforce.
The same research shows the reluctance of customers to return offline in any shape or form:
Approximately 78% of banking customers initiate their relationships with banks through websites or mobile applications.
At the same time, FSIs often face criticism from customers and industry experts in key areas:
- Anticipating needs: Financial service institutions struggle to anticipate and fulfill customer needs proactively, resulting in a reactive approach to customer service.
- Prioritizing financial wellness: Many FSIs fail to prioritize the financial well-being of their customers, lacking comprehensive strategies and initiatives to support their clients’ financial health.
- Centralizing customer data: The inability to effectively centralize and manage customer data hinders their ability to provide personalized and seamless experiences.
- Enabling customer data control: FSIs often fail to empower customers to control their data, limiting transparency and control over their financial information.
While some operations still have to occur onsite, combining digital solutions with automation is crucial. As a prominent automation provider for the fintech industry, Salesforce offers tools like Financial Services Cloud and its derivatives for commercial, retail, investment, and corporate banking, as well as mortgage and lending. But how can the FSI sector better utilize this technology to reduce costs and innovate faster than their competitors?
Automation for Finance Sector: Use Cases and Benefits
Salesforce research also notes that there are a few key customer demands yet to be met by financial institutions:
- Easy and transparent interactions;
- Efficient automation for streamlined operations;
- Seamless, personalized, and caring experiences.
Thankfully, today’s financial automation capabilities can cover many of these concerns.
Customer Insights and Data Management
Traditionally, investment bankers and advisory teams have invested significant time and effort in understanding client accounts before engaging with them. Modern Corporate and Investment Banking (CIB) solutions can consolidate all prior interactions and existing relationships and leverage AI to analyze internal and external data sources to ensure they meet clients fully prepared.
Automation in the finance sector also improves productivity during various stages of deal execution. Bankers and financial analysts can efficiently assess priorities and next steps across their portfolio of opportunities, reducing frustration and ensuring critical timelines are met. Deal flow management becomes simplified in a single system, enabling win/loss analysis and pipeline optimization.
Marketing
It’s not news that the future lies in personalized marketing, crafting campaigns tailored to individual customer needs and preferences. Financial institutions can now harness data science for a strategic, algorithmic approach to marketing analysis—by testing campaigns using audience search data, marketing teams gather valuable insights to refine their strategies. This accelerates return analysis, shortens test cycles, and allows for precise audience segmentation, ultimately boosting marketing campaign accuracy.
The implementation of Financial Services Cloud by LV= General Insurance has significantly improved its customer interactions and streamlined processes. With every email, live chat, and web form captured in Financial Services Cloud, LV= has gained valuable insights into changing consumer behaviors.
By analyzing these captured interactions, LV= was able to enhance its self-service capabilities and make certain customer-facing processes completely digital. For instance, during the COVID-19 pandemic, LV= introduced a Salesforce form for customers to submit simple home claims, resulting in 25% of claims being processed through this feature. This not only freed up the customer service team but also addressed the challenges faced during the lockdown period.
Don’t forget to check out: Salesforce Financial Services Cloud Winter ’24 Highlights
Customer Experience
Automation steps in to reduce friction, streamlining tasks like onboarding and responding to inquiries. This efficiency allows resources to shift towards providing personalized financial advice, aiding customers in achieving their financial goals.
For instance, CaixaBank, a prominent Spanish retail banking group, revolutionized its systems to elevate customer and agent experiences. Unifying contact center services and support numbers onto a single platform streamlined operations. Automated workflows in the back office increased productivity, ensuring consistent and seamless customer journeys. The integration of AI enabled millions of answers to customer inquiries monthly.
Combating Fraud and Navigating Compliance
Automation is a linchpin in the banking and insurance sector’s fight against fraud. Automated customer segmentation and verification bolster fraud detection. By reducing human touchpoints, compromised accounts can be swiftly frozen, and false positive investigations expedited through automation.
Automating regulatory reporting ensures comprehensive compliance across systems. Automated account structures provide insights into broader relationships, mitigating risks. Compliant data-sharing functionality allows secure sharing based on defined rules.
Account Closure Process
FSIs grapple with numerous monthly requests for account closures, often prompted by clients failing to provide the necessary proof. Managing this volume of inquiries, coupled with strict checklists, increases the risk of human error.
Here’s where Robotic Process Automation (RPA) steps in. Automated reminders prompt customers to submit required details, and RPA processes requests efficiently based on predefined rules. Ir ensures a swift, accurate account closure process, even in exceptional scenarios like non-compliance with KYC (Know Your Customer) regulations.
Quote-to-Bind Times
Legacy applications, cumbersome setups, and offline processes result in less-than-ideal experiences for all parties involved.
Automated pre-fill for standard applications lightens the load on producers and clients, replacing lengthy, text-heavy documents delivered in PDF or other unstructured formats.
Digitizing submissions also facilitates the immediate use of data by rating engines, generating instant quotes. The digital workbench allows swift evaluation if an application requires human underwriter review. Digitization also allows omni-channel access for real-time quoting, whether for brokers or customers directly.
Underwriting
Automation aids, particularly for simpler risks, allowing underwriters to collaborate efficiently with producers. Automation enhances underwriting processes by providing a 360-degree view of brokers and customers. This comprehensive view instills confidence, enabling underwriters to manage quotes and referrals and confirm decisions faster.
Azur, an insurance provider, transformed its underwriting and quoting processes with Salesforce. The company streamlined data across its business, achieving faster decision-making. Automation reduced home insurance quoting time to just 90 seconds, improving the underwriting loss ratio by 2%. Salesforce’s agility allowed Azur to try new ideas cost-effectively. The platform’s automation capabilities provided a competitive edge and enhanced user experiences for brokers and policyholders alike.
Key Advantages of Salesforce CRM Software in the FinTech Industry
Why use Salesforce Financial Services Cloud (FSC), and what features are worth trying?
With its robust capabilities and customizable nature, FSC offers an all-encompassing solution for banks, insurance, and wealth management seeking to streamline their operations. With a proper setup, FSC can serve as a full-fledged financial system. But what exactly is in it for FSI?
How Financial Services Cloud Help FinTech institutions Retain Customers
Insights into Your Customers and Their Demands
Financial Services Cloud (FSC) empowers personal bankers with business-oriented features, consolidating customer information, needs, and objectives into a unified view of summarized and visualized data on financial accounts and households.
Personal bankers deepen their understanding by leveraging key customer information stored in fields and objects, such as branch and communication preferences, financial profile, educational background, and employment status. Introducing new record types for banking products further enhances clarity, encompassing checking, savings, mortgage, and home equity loans.
Retail Banking Rollups provide a consolidated snapshot of all financial accounts, enabling personal bankers to grasp customers’ holdings at a glance. Integration with core banking systems brings valuable insights through objects like Charges & Fees and Financial Transactions, empowering personal bankers with the information needed for exceptional service.
New fields like Expressed Interest prioritize customer needs, ensuring personalized attention. These comprehensive profiles grant seamless access to the information necessary for delivering superior customer service.
Streamlined Collaborations with Customers and Partners
Integrating digital channels with Financial Services Cloud enables specialists in the finance sector to effectively address customers’ needs in responsive online сommunities, and encourages customers to actively participate in the process by contributing data about their financial accounts and requirements. Furthermore, customers and partners can make referrals directly from their personal networks.
Financial Services Cloud empowers organizations to customize these communities easily using simple clicks instead of complex coding. This agility allows traditional institutions like banks to innovate quickly and stay ahead of evolving customer expectations.
Enhanced Efficiency and Personalized Experiences
Financial Services Cloud’s Banker Lightning Console is designed to optimize productivity with key data and tasks displayed in high transaction volume cases. To keep specialists in the loop across multiple customer engagement activities, the console features customizable Productivity Cards such as Birthdays, Referrals Assigned to Me, and My Top Referrers.
With workflows and quick actions integrated into Einstein Analytics dashboards, banks can swiftly create comprehensive customer profiles and take immediate action based on insights. Moreover, service agents can access relevant information by linking financial accounts, customers, or households to specific cases, facilitating efficient issue resolution.
Faster Time-to-value
The ability to quickly implement a new CRM system is crucial for maximizing ROI across industries. Financial Services Cloud offers retail banks robust out-of-the-box functionality, seamless integration with core banking systems, and collaboration with best-of-breed partners.
By simplifying the configuration of banking users and their data access, you can expedite time-to-value, enabling employees to grasp a customer’s financial accounts and personal information swiftly. Integrating retail banking objects with core systems empowers bankers to trigger timely alerts for significant events such as loan approvals, charges, and fees.
Financial Services Cloud User Interface
Finance Automation Software to Integrate with Salesforce
When out–of-box FSC capabilities don’t seem to cut it, there are always more options at AppExchange platform to cover the specific workflow. Here are a few notable applications for optimizing the most common processes related to day-to-day operations:
nCino
The application provides automation solutions for critical banking processes, including loan origination, account opening, and customer onboarding. With nCino, financial institutions can streamline their operations by automating document processing, workflows, and compliance tasks. The tool also enables collaboration among team members and provides real-time visibility into the status of processes.
DocuSign eSignature
Financial institutions can digitize the entire document lifecycle with DocuSign eSignature for Salesforce, eliminating the need for manual paperwork and improving efficiency. DocuSign eSignature integrates seamlessly with Salesforce, allowing users to send, sign, and manage documents directly within the Salesforce platform. It offers robust security features and covers processes such as account opening, loan applications, client onboarding, and compliance documentation.
Opentext Solutions
OpenText corporation is a prominent Enterprise Information Management (EIM) provider, offering multiple document and information management solutions compatible with Financial Services Cloud. For instance, Exstream is an app for document generation of letters, quotes, proposals, contracts, and service documents using customizable templates.
Another example is Extended ECM Documentum, a robust document management solution designed specifically for the financial industry. Key features include document capture and indexing, version control, access control, audit trails, and automated document workflows.
Check out another amazing blog by Twistellar here: Successful Salesforce User Adoption in 2024: Strategies and Red Flags
EasySend
With EasySend, businesses can create and manage forms, webflows, eSignatures, and digital customer journeys. The application reduces time to market by 80% and provides advanced data analytics, empowering institutions to make informed marketing decisions without coding. EasySend also enables the replacement of manual admin with dynamic, bespoke eForms, and provides an AI form builder to digitize old PDFs automatically. It seamlessly integrates with existing databases and workflows to capture relevant customer data reliably.
Engageware
Engageware offers intelligent appointment management solutions within Salesforce CRM to address growing businesses’ challenges, such as managing complex schedules and expanding client bases. With one-click appointment scheduling and automatic calendar synchronization, prospects can book appointments with sales or service team members, providing all the necessary information upfront for productive and profitable meetings.
Engageware operates across all customer-facing sectors, enabling pool availability across the team to cater to more customers, allowing easy rescheduling and adding team members to existing appointments, and automating administrative tasks, including appointment reminders.
Banking on Automation
The future of finance is undoubtedly digital. As baby boomers pass on their assets to the next generation, legacy institutions, and newcomers will face a singular challenge to uncover comprehensive customer data.
Financial services and banking must change their mindsets, transcend a hodgepodge of systems, automate strategically, focus on new success metrics, and engage partners if they want to improve the customer experience.
By leveraging Salesforce offering, financial institutions can:
- Offer easy-to-use interfaces and relevant information across preferred channels;
- Automate strategically to optimize customer service and operational efficiency;
- Foster seamless experiences, personalization, and a caring approach to enhance customer satisfaction and financial well-being.
This article was originally published at Twistellar.com
