Benefits of CRM for Business Banking

With so many online banks on the rise, customers have more options for banks than dollars in their accounts. In today’s market, it’s not enough for a business bank to offer great rates – to stand out, a truly amazing bank must be a lifelong confidante and source of sound advice for its customers.

But keeping track of each customer’s industry, needs, challenges, and goals can be hard for a growing business bank. To that end, CRM system can help you manage customer data and relationships, helping you provide tailored insights, modern solutions, and outstanding service that will keep customers coming back.

What is CRM in Business Banking?

CRM (customer relationship management) is a company’s processes and tools to track customer-company interactions. With CRM, businesses can learn more about those relationships and potentially increase sales. Rather than focusing on the methodology, CRM nowadays usually means CRM software systems. 

CRM systems are software tools that record and store all customer data in one easily-accessible location. For business banks, this provides a detailed account of each customer’s transactions, meetings, and accounts and provides a holistic view of all of the bank’s customers. 

By automatically integrating every customer touchpoint—online and in-person—into one database, banking CRMs hope to give business banks a comprehensive understanding of their customer journeys and enable them to make data-driven strategies to grow their business.

Benefits of Using a Banking CRM

Let’s take a look at four discrete benefits of using a CRM for business banking.

1. Improve Customer Experience

With a banking CRM, any teller or financial advisor can immediately access a customer’s full profile and history, giving them a 360-degree view of the customer. Armed with this information, your employees can anticipate the customer’s needs, find patterns in the data, and offer solutions personalized to the customer’s unique needs. As a result, your bank can provide more value and build long-term customer loyalty.

For example, if a customer casually mentions to a bank teller that they’re hoping to move their business’s office in the future, the teller could use the bank’s CRM to relay that information to the loan department, which could begin promoting business mortgage loan plans to the customer. Since your customers are busy people, they’ll appreciate the proactiveness!

2. Make More Sales

Unlike commercial banks and retail businesses, business banks have fewer customers, but those customers tend to have much more money in their accounts. Finding new customers, attracting them to your bank, and keeping them interested in your deals is the top priority for growing business banks.

To that end, a banking CRM can help you quickly identify, qualify, target, and onboard new customers and opportunities before competitors can snatch them away. Going back to our previous example with the mortgage loan, it was our banking CRM’s communication features that allowed us to discover the customer’s needs and promote to them – without it, the customer might have done their own research online and picked a different bank.

3. Implement Better Strategies

On top of the minutiae of each customer, a banking CRM also provides a birds-eye view of all of the bank’s customers at once, instantaneously generating reports and graphs on customer activities, engagement, purchases, and more.

With an accurate understanding of your bank’s current standing and situation, you can easily make data-driven decisions and forward-thinking strategies.

4. Increase Productivity

A banking professional hopes to spend their time analyzing financials and sending proposals, rather than mindlessly filling in Excel spreadsheets and tabulating data. A banking CRM can handle all the data inputting and automate administrative tasks, freeing up your employees’ time to focus on what matters most – the customers. 

Not only does this enrich employees’ jobs, it helps keep costs down, as your bank can do more with fewer people. Plus, with all the live data and messages hosted in one place, employees can easily communicate and coordinate with each other, speeding up business processes.

Conclusion

Many retail businesses may succeed with a one-and-done transaction model, but those in the banking industry aim to foster long-term connections with their customers. That means being attentive to each customer, learning about their unique situation, and providing personalized service. 

A banking CRM could help a bank or credit union gain a holistic picture of their customers and provide personalized service, improving customer satisfaction, sales, strategies, and productivity.

Standing out in the banking sector means offering more than a high return rate – by using a CRM for business banking, you could distinguish yourself through exemplary customer service and build a loyal customer base for years to come.