Often banks and credit unions ask the question “What CRM do banks use?” The answer to this question depends a lot on the strategic value that a financial institution is looking to achieve by using a CRM and by looking at where the CRM will be implemented.
As you are aware, banking CRM means a lot of different things to different people and institutions. Early bank CRM was focused mainly on storage of commonly used information in a centralized database. The goal was to collect as much information about a bank customers and store the information in a common database so that the information could be accessed from different locations.
Having commonly used customer information stored in a central location is great to have, however the issue with traditional banking CRM is that the end users have a difficult time gleaming the value from the information to use it to build or expand the customer relationship. Often the CRM software tool is generic, and many find it hard to use or hard to find the exact information to help the banker perform his or her specific job.
Modern CRM solutions take this into account. They focus on using data analytics and software tools specifically built for the end users’ job to help bankers easily consume the bank’s CRM information. Here are a few examples:
Bank Tellers: Tellers have the need to connect one-on-one with each customer that walks up to the teller window. Tellers need quick access to a relationship building informational data elements like customer birthdays, profile questions, quick access to create referrals, and other pre-analyzed sales lead information. Tellers have just a few seconds during the end of a transaction to make a product or service recommendation and they have no time for looking up a customer, reading through long note histories, etc. Information needs to be pre-analyzed, accurate and quickly accessible as every second counts.
Commercial Bankers: The usage of customer relationship information is quite different for a commercial banker. Commercial bankers have a longer sales process. Commercial bankers are more interested in CRM features that focus on managing appointments, keeping detail notes, having easy access using a mobile device or tablet computer, updating sales pipelines and managing loan and deposit workflow. Early banking CRM was never intended to include all this functionality. However, as banking CRM has evolved, it is now required as commercial bankers time is valuable and we all need to get more commercial sales with less manual resources.
To answer the question as to what CRM bankers use, there are a variety of products available on the market. Each institution needs to decide on what problems they are expecting to solve using a banking CRM. Once this has been determined, the choice will be clear.
For more information on Quest Analytics IQCRM Suite of tools is helping bankers achieve relationship building success, visit our website at https://www.quest-analytics.com or call us at 412-347-0386.