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Meeting customer expectations is undoubtedly not easy for any company, and it could be even more challenging for financial services industries. While your customers might want to have proactive insights or personalised outreach, for example, you might still not have the tools to achieve those needs. Especially in banking, Customer Relationships Management (CRM) has become vitally needed if you want the business to grow. Along together with the implementation of the right technology, it will help the organisation departments to be correctly aligned and closer to customers. The state of online banks, for example, is no longer only expectations. It is happening now, and it is, indeed, growing fast. Today, we can see the successful examples of N26, Revolut or Monese; therefore, if you are in the FinServ industry, there is no time to lose. The technology is available; however, we understand that it may be hard to decide on which one would be benefiting the business in the way you want. In the way you expect. In the way your customers need. We have gathered valuable information that will help you make an informed decision. According to Salesforce, a CRM software in the financial services and banking helps manage customer better as well as understand their needs with the objective of offering the right solutions, and faster. You know that time is vital in CRM.
Having a career in the Salesforce consulting space is an extremely rewarding one. Working with one of the world's most innovative companies and therefore products make every project we embark on exciting. That, coupled with the fact that at EMPAUA we are working with like-minded clients, is doubly rewarding for us. The digital age is changing financial services.Data regulation is stricter and increasingly- informed consumers are demanding more from their banking institutions. For companies within the Financial Services space, digital transformation is of pivotal importance to ensure customer needs are met. At EMPAUA, our speciality is working with fast-growing or, "hyper-growth", clients. These are defined as customers that are growing so fast, and they need to be working with the best systems and processes to ensure nothing slows them down. A specific industry that goes hand in hand with these types of businesses in Financial Services. A vast majority of the customers we work with at EMPAUA are involved in the FinServ, FinTech, or other similarly linked industries (PropTech, InsurTech, etc.) We have seen massive success in these sectors, by demonstrating value to these businesses and delivering exceptional projects that see Salesforce becomes a fundamental part of their day to day organisation.
For various reasons that anyone involved in FinServ will understand, it is the most highly regulated industry out there. For this reason, it is of the utmost importance that you have full control over who does what inside your CRM, as well as a full reportable log of everything that has happened.Salesforce has a couple of solutions that make this a breeze. Firstly the Salesforce security model is deep and complex. Permissions can be granted and taken away on a mass or individual basis, all the way down to the single fields that a user can access. Salesforce's external security controls are just as impressive; restricted by the time, the location, the IP address is all possible to bolster up controls around who has access and when.You can also enforce Two Factor Authentication (2FA) across the entire organisation, forcing all users to approve access through their phone (even using their fingerprint!).To comply with auditing regulations, you can enable audit history for any fields inside Salesforce. This will store who changed the data, what was changed from and to, and the exact time and date this occurred. This information is stored for up to 18 months but can be extended with the Salesforce Shield package, that contains various tools to better comply with regulations.
It is nothing new that Salesforce is an open platform and has been for the nearly 20 years they have been operating. That is evident from the launch of the AppExchange back in 2005, which is a marketplace comparable to the App Store or Google Play store. Most FinServ companies that we work with already have a suite of products they are using and will continue to use. These could be anything from their backend platforms, marketing tools (Pardot, Marketing Cloud, Hubspot), credit checking tools (Credit Safe), or data enrichment tools (Dun & Bradstreet). The benefit of working with the world's #1 CRM, is that most of these 3rd party applications will need to integrate with Salesforce to keep up with the market natively! In some cases, this application might not natively integrate with Salesforce, and a custom integration is required. However, have no fear, integrating a platform such as your backend into Salesforce alongside an implementation partner like EMPAUA, is generally a straightforward task to complete. That is a requirement we are seeing more and more from our customers and generally provides enormous value back to the business by completing the loop from the sale, to seeing how the customer is using your product.
A key piece of information to remember about Salesforce is that it is a platform, not an individual product. For a lot of companies going through their digital transformation, this is a crucial piece of the puzzle when thinking about scaling, as well as implementing a new state of the art products. For example, many companies embark on a project with one or two Salesforce clouds (but possibly more). That commonly includes Sales + Service Cloud, or Sales Cloud + Pardot, or maybe spicing things up with a Sales plus Community Cloud implementation.Because Salesforce exists as one platform when a phase two or three projects come about, you need to do no more than phone up Salesforce, switch on the licenses for the new product, and begin implementation.For Financial Services organisations, there are very few companies that can offer this kind of scalable solution. Linking back to compliance, this also ensures that every part of your business is running on the same platform and therefore maintains the same strict security.
Living in the age that we are, speed is everything. Having IT projects that span years is no longer an option, as, by the time the system has been implemented, the business, the industry, and the world we live in will have changed dramatically. That could not hold more exact for Financial Services firms, especially at the current state of innovation we see around the globe. Ulster Bank showcased its cutting edge implementation at the Salesforce London World Tour earlier last month.Salesforce has always been built for speed. Being able to customise Salesforce with mostly clicks and not code means that applications can be developed, and the Salesforce products can be customised at the speed of light. At EMPAUA we offer a quick start package that takes only a couple of weeks from project kick-off, all the way through to go-live. That is just how fast Salesforce can be implemented inside your business.For most complex implementations that require integration and need cumbersome business processes implemented, we are talking only months and not years. This kind of speed is still realised once the system has been integrated. Changes, maintenance, and feature development are as painless as they can be when using a system like Salesforce.
Thanks to Salesforce and it is a suite of products. Our customers in the financial services industry have been able to get going quickly, on a limited budget, with the most powerful CRM platform available today. This has enabled some of the startups we work with to instantly compete with some of the more established brands out there.For the more prominent brands we have worked for, they have taken their first steps to proper digital transformation. Want to see what Salesforce can do for your business? Connect with us!Do you want to talk to our consultants? Get in contact with us today and book a free 2-hour workshop with us. Book a Workshop!!
Written By: Ben McCarthy, Managing Director EMPAUA London.
