Customer Relationship Management for Banks

Introduction

Banking representatives come to understand that the use of modern approaches to customer service is inevitable; this is already an absolute norm for Western financial companies. Automating customer acquisition and retention processes lowers operational and administrative costs and creates great opportunities for additional competitive advantage.

CRM systems are a classic tool for solving such problems. CRM – corporate information systems that solve the problems of customer relationship management. Columbus has extensive experience with this class of systems, in addition to the selection and implementation of solutions; we primarily focus on consulting on organizing customer relationships.

The main tasks of CRM for banks

The key task of CRM is to automate front-office business processes. CRM is designed to enable the transition from bulk sales to personalized deal tactics, so you can create unique offers for each customer. The result will be more comfortable, effective, and most importantly, long-term relationships.

It is impossible to expand your business by selling only standard services, especially when it comes to working with the most “profitable” clients. High-quality CRM systems allow not only performing simple segmentation based on customer characteristics, but also revealing hidden dependencies between various data, predicting customer behavior by analyzing terabytes of data. For example, it can be established that customers who have used any service or product of the bank, with a certain degree of probability, also purchase additional services.

An important task is to increase the efficiency of marketing campaigns, the profitability of banking instruments and their positioning in relation to a certain group of clients. It is interesting to understand which marketing campaigns have been profitable for specific target groups, and which have not, and why. How many new customers did they attract, how many of them became loyal as a result, etc. Such studies are indispensable for the preparation of new marketing programs and proposals; CRM systems provide the data array necessary for analysis. For example, you can filter out clients who refused a loan offer and determine the patterns of what happened, or analyze the logic of those who did take out a loan – after that it will be easier for you to target specific groups of clients.

How to understand when CRM implementation is necessary

When the bank’s management begins to realize that:

• there is no information about how many potential customers the selling divisions have, with whom they are currently working, how much money they can bring by the end of the quarter;
• there is no opportunity to effectively manage the processes of attracting and serving customers;
• clients leave for unknown reasons;
• huge budgets are wasted on marketing campaigns that are not producing results.

All banking clients can be roughly divided into three categories: large enterprises, medium and small businesses, and individuals. Also, premium-class clients can be singled out separately. To interact with premium clients, CRM systems, as a rule, are not needed – how efficiently the work with them proceeds depends solely on the qualifications and conscientiousness of individually assigned managers. The need for systems arises when working with SMB enterprises. To get high income in this market, it is necessary to increase turnover, increase the productivity of bank employees and reduce the cost of servicing. An even greater cost reduction requires work with physical by persons. And here you just can’t do without CRM.