BECOMING A CUSTOMER-CENTRIC BANK: FOUR KEY PIECES OF THE JIGSAW PUZZLE

Transcription

1 pointofview BECOMING A CUSTOMER-CENTRIC BANK: FOUR KEY PIECES OF THE JIGSAW PUZZLE

2 Banks that successfully transform operations to focus on customers rather than products will survive and thrive. In this digital age, it is imperative to select the right technology that can enable such a shift, but being customer centric is about more than just technology. There are a number of pieces that must fit together to build effective, customer-centric operations. These include process and cultural changes, in addition to the right platform engagement. It s a bit like putting together a jigsaw puzzle. Your bank can no longer win share of wallet using traditional tactics. Instead, you must strive to differentiate on based on customer experience. For banks beginning the journey or seeking to accelerate transformation, this article describes four key pieces of the puzzle steps that will go a long way toward completing the picture of a bank ready to win a greater share of wallet from today s and tomorrow s customers. 2

3 Banks and credit unions are some of the oldest establishments in the country. Many have been around for more than a century. This tenure can be an incredible asset for a trusted financial institution. But it many cases, it has led to outdated processes, Band-Aid solutions, lines of business or regions operating in silos, and deepseeded resistance to change. These can make it challenging to respond to customers changing expectations and compete successfully in today s market. To illustrate the challenge, consider Michelle a customer in her early 30s who owns her home and consistently makes direct payments from her bank account (shared with her partner) on a mortgage with another institution. Michelle paid off her car loan years ago. What experience do you want Michelle and her partner to have? Since she has a car, she matches the criteria for your auto-refinancing program. Would you send her an offer to refinance her auto loan? Since she has a mortgage with another institution, would you send her an offer for low mortgage rates for new homeowners? Without a specific, targeted value proposition that appeals to Michelle, it would be easy to send her irrelevant or mass communications that diminishes her perception of your bank. You have data available that you can use to deliver a positive banking experience. For example, you could send her an offer to refinance her current mortgage that includes a rate comparison and monthly savings estimate. Then, you can plan a follow-up call from a personal banker. Now, we are getting somewhere! This is the type of engagement and experience customers expect: easy, personalized, proactive, and relevant to their needs and goals. Your bank can no longer win share of wallet using traditional tactics. Knowing your customer is paramount. Inundating them with irrelevant offers, no matter how low the price is compared to the market, will be a deterrent. And lowering prices on commoditized products simply erodes margin. Instead, you must strive to differentiate based on customer experience. But with customer expectations evolving, this means rethinking your operating model to remain relevant in the market and avoid losing to banks of the future. The way different generations interact with banks is profoundly changing. To put this in perspective, a study done by FIS Consumer Banking in 2016 found that 61% of baby boomers meet in-person with a traditional financial advisor who provides personalized service for a traditional fee as compared to 35% of millennials. Furthermore, 25% of millennials use an automated investment service that recommends investments according to your income, goals and comfort with risk and rebalances your portfolio automatically at a much lower service fee than human advisors charge as compared to 15% of baby boomers. How can you navigate this level of change and reorganize operations around your customers rather than products? 3

4 PUTTING THE RIGHT PIECES IN PLACE Achieving transformation is like putting together a jigsaw puzzle. There are a number of pieces that must fit together to create the picture of a customer-centric financial organization and raise the probability of conversion. These include: SALES FUNDAMENTALS CONSISTENTLY REMARKABLE SERVICE DATA CULTURAL CHANGE While the scope and scale of each puzzle piece will depend on your bank s size and complexity, all four pieces must be in place to transform your operating model to focus on customers rather than products. 1. Sales fundamentals: Nail the brilliant basics. Establishing an enterprise view of customers across all lines of business sounds simple enough, but it can be a monumental rock to move. It will require process and technology changes that allow customer-facing employees to spend time on what really matters gathering and using information about your customers in a way that helps your bank meet customers financial goals. As important as it is to make things easy and seamless for your customers, you also need to make it easy for employees to have productive conversations about customers financial goals and to make appropriate referrals regardless of their role or line of business. By enabling employees to spend less time on administrative work and less time toggling between systems, you can equip them to ask the right questions and document insights gained. Then, your bank is positioned to identify appropriate actions. Boosting the volume of documented, relevant referrals is a great place to start and Salesforce is the perfect hub for facilitating the referral management process and capturing this type of information. These warm introductions created through conversations or with data about an existing customer have a much higher likelihood of conversion than mass marketing campaigns that aren t targeted to specific needs. Often times, a customer is unaware of the options fully available to them and doesn t have the time or energy to do the research on their own to find out. People are used to things like Netflix and Amazon that proactively suggest the next show or item you might like based on your history and profile why should a banking experience be any different? 4

5 The market and customer expectations have shifted where focusing on customer experience in banking is no longer a nice to have, it is a prerequisite for survival. Taking this to the next level means targeting conversations and campaigns based on marketing analytics. Once you have the fundamentals in place to support sales processes, analytics allow you to automatically identify the next best cross sell based on history and logic leveraging financial account, transaction, and pattern data. An integration between Salesforce and a Customer Analytics Platform can provide this type of information at a Banker s fingertips. Unique logic based on trends can populate suggested talking points for bankers who interact with the customer. The banker can indicate whether the customer is interested, not interested, or neutral. This information goes back into the analytics tool, helping remove guesswork and creating more positive and consistent future experiences for both customers and employees. 2. Consistently remarkable service: Utilize precious in-person or phone time with customers more effectively. Any bank can deliver a remarkable experience from time to time, but being consistently remarkable is the real goal. According to Gartner, 89% of companies believe to be competing mostly on the basis of customer experience now, versus 36% four years ago.1 This game-changing transformation begins to take shape when you can piece together service with sales fundamentals. By focusing on customers instead of selling products, you break down traditional silos between sales and service processes. All employees have some responsibility for sales whether directly or indirectly. It s the same principle that applies to a well-run, customer-focused business-to-consumer (B2C) Any bank can deliver a remarkable experience from time to time, but being consistently remarkable is the real goal. organization: The easier it is for me to give you my money, the more likely I am to do so. Companies like Uber and Zappos have mastered the art of easy. Your customers expect a similar experience when interacting with your bank. Just as you want to make it easy to log referrals, you also should strive to make it easy to submit and track service requests whether directly with the back office or indirectly through thirdparty systems. One way to accomplish this is to establish a central hub for typical service requests that makes it easy for employees to follow up tracking your service requests or cases in Salesforce helps to decrease the systems a user must toggle between to service a customer or have a meaningful conversation about their relationship. This type of hub can share certain service requests with specific lines of business or roles, controlling who has the ability to complete a service request. 1Gartner for Marketers, Gartner Surveys Confirm Customer Experience Is the New Battlefield, October 23, 2014, 5

6 Keeping customers informed of service status is paramount. In user-centered design, a key heuristic is ensuring the user has feedback about progress for example, whether a page is loading, something is downloading, or if there is a stall in progress. The same principle applies to customer interactions. Enabling customers and bank employees with easy access to service status keeps all parties informed of progress. Just as important, it reinforces that the bank s systems, people and processes are well coordinated. action. Sharing data, where compliant and appropriate, is critical to creating a targeted and consistently remarkable experience. 3. Data: Use and share your financial data to understand and serve customers better. Data-driven marketing and sales is a hot topic in the financial services industry. Many banks have systems used solely to drive their marketing and sales strategy. Often, though, these systems exist in silos, accessible only to those with a need to know. To facilitate transformation to a customercentric organization, your sales personnel need access to actionable customer and prospect data. Sharing data, where compliant and appropriate, is critical to creating a targeted and consistently remarkable experience. It prevents sales personnel from having to sift through mountains of reports to determine whom to call and avoids unfortunate situations such as a service associate answering the phone without knowing she is interacting with a high-value customer. This is the type of information that can be tailored to a customer relationship view within the Salesforce platform. Most relevant and pertinent information needed at a glance can go towards the top and other details can be found lower below the fold of the webpage. In that way, a tailored and comprehensive customer view allows an employee to make informed suggestions or take the appropriate With the right data at hand, sales and service teams can speed resolution and improve the chance of providing a consistently positive experience. Integration with more robust marketing analytics tools that analyze transactions and patterns can take this to the next level by identifying specific products that a customer has a propensity to buy. Those tools integration seamlessly with Salesforce and can help drive even more value out of every interaction a customer has with a member of your bank. 4. Cultural change: Empower employees to act like owners and contribute above and beyond their roles. Successful transformation to a customer-centric business model requires aligning technology to business processes not the other way around. Be prescriptive and deliberate in configuring technology to meet operating requirements, strategic objectives, and key performance indicators. While it is commonplace to send company-wide communications and train personnel when implementing new systems, this is where change management often ends and the hard work spent on documenting processes, gathering 6

7 requirements, and building a new system will be for naught. The market and customer expectations have shifted where focusing on customer experience in banking is no longer a nice to have, it is a prerequisite for survival. Changing mindsets takes time and focus. Many banks underestimate the impact that new technology has on employees roles, responsibilities, or even transparency of performance on day-to-day tasks. Enabling technology brings an element of digital documentation of people s activities. While great for reporting and trend analysis, this could be alarming to employees who have always operated autonomously or in a more offline environment. Moving to a customer-centric model ultimately changes how employees should act. As a result, you will need to use care in walking employees through changes to ensure their behavior drives results. Effective cultural change: w Defines the vision and types of key performance indicators (KPIs) that are important to track before and after implementing change emphasizing the what s in it for me w Motivates and equips executives to lead by example w Communicates early, often, and consistently sharing success stories that illustrate how the changes matter w Outlines the impact to people with a plan to support and encourage behavioral change w Trains individuals to use new systems/ processes and then continuously build on that training remember, most people retain only a small portion of what they learn in formal training, thus on-thejob support will reinforce training over time Finally, it is important to measure productivity and efficiency improvements by benchmarking performance before and after change. Information is power capitalize on it The actions outlined in this paper constitute four key pieces in successful transformation to a customer-centric bank. There are other essential elements that banks should consider. For example, it will be important to develop incentive structures to ensure employees are using the right systems with customers and turning servicing moments into new opportunities. Every customer interaction is an opportunity to learn more about the customer s financial goals and objectives and to leave the individual with a positive experience. Information is power and the more you can use technology to support the right conversations about financial goals, the greater your likelihood of increasing your share of the customer s wallet. When done right, this doesn t feel like selling. It feels like a true partnership. KEY TAKEAWAYS: Contact Salesforce to see if it is the right technology for your bank and make sure that you pick the partner who can help with process and cultural change, which will be equally important. Fundamental change is not easy; be ready to roll up your sleeves, allocate enough resources to the effort, and seek help where necessary. The results will be worth it. 7

8 About West Monroe Partners West Monroe is a progressive business and technology consulting firm that partners with dynamic organizations to reimagine, build, and operate their businesses at peak performance. Our team of more than 800 professionals is comprised of an uncommon blend of business consultants and deep technologists. This unique combination of expertise enables us to design, develop, implement, and run strategic business and technology solutions that yield a dramatic commercial impact on our clients profitability and performance. To learn more, visit us at For more information, please contact: Reva Busby Senior Manager, World Class Capabilities Lead Reva Busby has over 10 years of expertise in project management, business process transformation, and end-to-end system implementations. Reva has led engagements from solution definition to value realization ensuring requirements, process, and scope are clearly defined while considering the organization s ecosystem and overall strategic goals. rbusby@westmonroepartners.com Ken Goebel Manager, Customer Experience Ken Goebel specializes in customer relationship management (CRM) solutions for clients in the banking, wealth management, capital markets, trading, asset management, private equity, and manufacturing and distribution industries. He has more than seven years of experience in marketing and sales operations, process improvement and automation, project management, change management, system selection, and other disciplines. kgoebel@westmonroepartners.com Special Contribution: Bryan Lee, Global Head, Commercial Banking and FinTech, Salesforce West Monroe Partners westmonroepartners.com