Today, any new technology platform will have little relevance for banks if it doesn’t address an important question: how can banks improve customer experience using that technology? Although interest rates continue to remain a significant factor for someone to decide whether to do business with your bank, customer experience matters more than ever before. 

That’s because of several reasons. For instance, if your CRM can reduce the turnaround time (TAT), your customer begins to draw the advantages of your products faster. This, in turn, can help them become more competitive and win more business. 

Let’s understand how banking CRM can improve customer experience:

1. Get data-driven insights

The most obvious way a banking CRM solution can improve customer experience is by leveraging data and churning out valuable insights.

Your bank generates both quantitative data (e.g. interest rates, banking penetration, credit scores) and qualitative data (quality of assets, credit evaluation practices, quality of leads) on a daily basis. Your CRM is the ideal way of organizing data in a way that makes sense.

Additionally, a good CRM is designed to handle tons of data, make the right interpretations, and help you spot trends. All this enables your teams to serve customers with information that’s most relevant to their requirements. 

2. Interpret issues and suggest interventions

The way technology has flooded our lives has also changed customer expectations in ways that were unimaginable just a decade back. Smart devices have placed virtually the entire world on the fingertips of your customers and everything is moving fast. 

Primed by all this, your customer expects your bank to be swift in operations, highly responsive in turnarounds and seamlessly connected across platforms. Anything less and your customer feels you’re falling short on your promise. 

As a matter of fact, the way it handles customer queries is a good place to begin understanding how CRM systems improve customer experience in banks. Your AI-powered CRM will ‘read’ emails sent by customers, classify the mails and forward them to the correct teams. 

For instance, if the email is for a product inquiry, your CRM will forward it to the product team. If the email is a complaint for a service, your CRM will bring the service team into the loop.

There are at least two major advantages in this. One, the CRM is an automated system so you will never have a situation of a team-member forgetting the customer query. The CRM will keep popping up reminders for every pending query, making it impossible to ignore or forget the query. And two, your CRM uses automation while handling queries, enabling you to respond to your customers at the speed they expect you to.

3. Integrate with multiple channels

It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that customers today are spoilt for choice, when it comes to digital platforms. From Twitter to Facebook and Q&A forums to review sites, they are everywhere.  And they expect you to be there too.

To answer this, your CRM lets you build a multi-channel experience. When it comes to scaling, your CRM has figured out the how. To improve customer experience in banking, it enables you to understand and empathize with your customers and remain present where your customers are present.

It suggests timely and appropriate interventions for each channel. By putting together all the insights, your CRM for banks helps build personalized experiences over each channel – something that your human teams wouldn’t have been able to do at scale.

4. Build granular-level segmentation

Think of a coffee bar you love. Why is it your favorite? 

There could be multiple reasons ranging from ambience to location, but one that truly stands out is that it serves the exact coffee you love. They know that you like cream in your coffee, that you prefer beans that are roasted just right and that you like just a dash of cinnamon, no more. Clearly they’ve figured your preferences out.

One of the major benefits of CRM in banking is that it can go down to granular level segmentation and figure out precisely what customers want. After that, it will club customers with identical preferences and requirements. And there you go, your perfect market segments are ready.

Precise segmentation lets your teams build super-targeted responses and campaigns. A parent who has already planned financing for their kid’s college will have financial needs that are different from one who is yet to solve the puzzle. Even if both parents are in the same demographic segment, their needs are vastly different, and only your CRM can do this level of granular segmentation.

5. Improve handling queries

Because a substantial portion of business banking can be big-ticket, your efficiency in handling queries can be the difference between winning or losing a big account. You want to accurately factor in the smallest nuances while handling queries.

An AI-powered bank CRM software can do that very well. Firstly, it keeps track of every query raised, and it won’t let go till it is resolved. That way, you don’t have to wonder if anything fell through the cracks. 

Secondly, a smart CRM can optimise the entire process of handling the query. You can train your chatbot to interpret and respond to basic questions without having to involve your human teams. The system will escalate the dialogue to your human teams once it crosses a threshold. And even when it is directed to a human team-member, your CRM can also tell who would be the best person to handle the query, whether they are available at the moment and so on.

6. Be assured of better at data protection

Data protection isn’t just a cool feature today, it’s statutory in most of the geographies. With the GDPR and CCPA firmly in place, non compliance can be both costly and time-consuming to get out of, not to mention lost opportunities.

The bank CRM does an excellent job in helping you stay compliant. It will get the necessary consent from your customers, and store that consent. Besides, you can instruct the CRM to send out communications to customers explaining how they can change their preferences any time they want.

When you’re looking for answers to the question on how to improve customer experience in banking, one of the best answers is providing peace of mind to customers. 

Your customers know they have complete control over their data. They find it very reassuring that there’s a strong system in place that follows their instructions on how, or how not, to use their data. And this kind of reassurance is something today’s customer values highly.

7. Spot areas of improvement

Your CRM isn’t a passive database, it’s a complete system in itself. When powered by AI, it can add a lot of value by constantly learning and improving workflows. 

The system records every interaction you have with a customer. Soon, it begins prescribing the best approach to every stage of engagement. This approach evolves over time and is a result of the cumulative learning, which is why it becomes so effective. 

Such learning not only helps create a smooth communication with the customer but also unveils more opportunities to profitably delight customers.

Gone are the days when people thought of a CRM as a mere sales platform. While all good banking CRMs most certainly accelerate sales, the outstanding ones help you unravel how can banks improve customer experience.

Besides, modern CRMs are now powered by AI because of which they are always in the learning-and-suggesting mode. An ideal CRM software not only records the communications of all your customer-facing teams but also processes all the data it collects. This builds a specialised knowledge pool that guides your team members at every customer touchpoint.

Modern banks can create a richer customer experience by leveraging data-driven insights, improving customer interactions by predicting trends and outcomes, segmenting at a granular level to create more targeted offers, and ensuring stronger data protection. Be sure your CRM can do this and more, because building a great customer experience is the ideal way to business growth.