CRM for Financial Institutions..Continued

As promised, I will discuss the remaining parameters that the financial institutions should give importance to successfully get the benefit of CRM.

Innovative Product Management: Product Managers must adopt a modular approach to product development, creating products and services that can be combined to become personalized offers for the customers. This will deliver maximum flexibility to the segment owners, the channel organizations and customers in creating a package of financial services that meets the customer’s needs.

Process Leadership: Financial Institutions must commit to ongoing process management and disciplined execution. Process Executives must be assigned to manage end-to-end process performance, especially with customer facing processes. Their role is to ensure the process is performed consistently, reliably and delivers value to financial institutions, its customers and its employees.

Customer Interaction: Gather and use customer information effectively and streamline the integrating processes from the customers’ perspective.

Customer Profiles: Identifying customer information necessary to manage customers’ needs and drive value-added customer relationship management strategies. Unify the customer data to create profiles of the customers which will act as a roadmap for capturing and retaining relevant customer information.

Customer focused Processes: Financial Institutions must redesign their processes from their customers’ perspective, mapping processes end-to-end across the financial institutions. The outside-in process view will create insight into the gap between financial institutions is delivering and what customers require. Once this is known, financial institutions can redesign their processes to meet customer needs.

Courtesy: Van De Laar

CRM for Financial Institutions

How can financial institutions ensure that they get a return on their CRM investments? It has been observed that in most of the financial institutions, there is a gap between the strategic intent of financial institutions, their CRM infrastructure and their operational reality. In order to realize full potential of CRM and the customers, financial institutions must restructure their organization and invest in professionalizing their customer interaction to close the gap. Financial institutions need to look at these parameters to successfully implement CRM and get the benefits out of it. They are:
1. Customer Advocacy
2. Customer Behavior Management.
3. Innovative Product Management
4. Process Leadership
5. Customer Interactions
6. Customer Profiles
7. Customer focused Processes.
I will highlight the first two parameters in this post and will write about the other parameters in my next post.

Customer Advocacy: CRM must have dedicated leadership at board level, naming a single executive to be responsible for creating the customer-centric culture. This person will be responsible for financial institution’s customer relationship vision and must define the strategy, restructure the organization, develop the channel capabilities, manage KPIs, and build the technical CRM infrastructure to realize the vision.

Customer Behavior Management: Behavior Management Strategies define key customer benefits and behavior objectives for a specific customer segment in order to drive the desired behaviors, such as:

1. Buy new products and services
2. Increase overall investment.
3. Make appointment
4. Use internet instead of branch
5. Feel good about their choice of financial institutions.

By defining behavior change strategies financial institutions can leverage the power of their CRM technology to effectively integrate and manage messages, offers and results.