Today’s retail banks, regardless of location or size, must be able to support and fulfill customers’ needs through a plethora of sales channels. Faced with tighter lending restrictions, banks must now be more proactive and effective when monitoring and responding to the evolving channel usage trends of their customers. The more traditional channels include physical stand-alone branches, ATMs, and call centers. The more modern channels consist of smaller in-store branches, as well as online and mobile platforms. As interactions with customers at physical branches continue to decline, online and mobile interactions have recently experienced explosive growth and demand. Most customers leverage a combination of these channels for purchasing decisions and for transaction execution.
In April, Sahir Anand of the Aberdeen Group released a report entitled “
On the other hand, leading banks that have successfully implemented multi-channel sales and service strategies are well-positioned to grow their customer and deposit base. Aberdeen notes that banks that display channel uniformity across all customer touchpoints at all times will facilitate a single, cohesive brand identity, which makes banking easy, simple, quick, consistent, and effortless for their customers. Banks committed to offering a multi-dimensional banking experience provide employees across different departments with a centralized customer database, such as Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011, that integrates, unifies, and cleanses data from all bank point-of-sale and service access channels. Giving branch tellers, call center and online support representatives, in-store and kiosk bankers, and branch relationship bankers the same comprehensive, holistic view of the bank’s customers definitely improves customer service and promotes retention rates. Fully armed with business insights on demographic data, transaction history, types of accounts owned, and types of products and services used, bank sales and support staff in all interaction channels can more easily achieve optimal cross-channel selling strategies that maximize the value to their clientele.
Banks looking to expand their cross-channel customer management strategies should consider investing in and implementing Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011. Banks that are slow to evolve to an integrated channel model will continue to struggle in the current tight lending environment and further lose market share to their competitors. As the cornerstone of a bank’s customer data hub, CRM 2011 can help consolidate data from multiple disconnected channel systems. Bank employees regardless of role, department, channel, or location, can rely on CRM 2011 to provide them with the key strategic business and colleague collaborative insight so they can provide more through, yet quicker service to their customers and also offer better suited product recommendations.
To learn more about how Customer Effective has tailored CRM 2011 for Best-in-Class Banks to help them overcome cross-channel integration challenges and increase their profits and performance, please visit our
Post by: Kevin Wessels,