For Financial Services Firms Interested In Hyper-Personalization, CRM Is Always The Key

Hyper-personalization refers to an organization’s ability to maximize the opportunities of catering to every customer's specific wants. This is more important than ever before in what is effectively the Age Of The Customer.

It is based upon the fact that customer expectations have changed across businesses and sectors, with customers now expecting the same kind of engagement from financial institutions that they do with other products or services.

More and more financial services firms are beginning to recognize that the ability to understand a customer better, based upon an understanding of individual likes and dislikes, enables them to offer solutions tailor-made for specific needs. This leads to product differentiation, deeper client engagement and, ultimately, customer loyalty.

Hyper-personalization is about understanding needs and intent thoroughly, to tailor not just a service but its messaging and marketing to what a customer expects from a financial services organization. It separates CRM that can communicate with a customer from CRM that genuinely engages with and leverages that relationship.

Strategy Starts With Data

Financial services firms recognize the importance of data, of course, but what matters is not the amount of data as much as the right type of data being collected. This is critical for the implementation of any hyper-personalization strategy, because the effectiveness of data-gathering impacts results about customer journeys in real-time.

Strategy begins with the definition of a desired audience. Events must also be defined, along with the kind of personalized message or action that each of them triggers. Channels also play a role, because they trigger real-time messaging based on importance and a customer’s interaction history. The kind of data available has changed dramatically in recent years, incorporating visual and auditory information where there was once just the written word. This has changed how organizations interact with customers, and also created new opportunities for those willing to invest in technology that can analyse these emerging kinds of data.

Understanding Customers Better Through CRM

Personalization is impossible if financial services firms don’t have the means to understand what high-value customers need on an ongoing basis. This can happen only with analytical tools from powerful CRM solutions that can make sense of structured as well as unstructured data to identify patterns. What matters equally is how these solutions translate and feed relevant information to advisors using easy-to-use dashboards.

A solution like NexJ CRM comes with features such as Comprehensive Customer View, which provides financial services organizations with a 360° view of their customers in an easy-to-view and navigable format. It empowers them to make recommendations instantly without the need for collating data. It also offers features like Relationship Hierarchy, which can aggregate and roll up account and interaction information, giving advisors and bankers detailed information on each client, including transactions, coverage team, related parties, and documents.

Then there are features like our Interaction Journal, which logs all client interactions, including meetings, communications, events, etc. NexJ CRM also allows bankers and advisors to capture and view notes about the contact and collect extended profile information with the help of custom fields and categories. The result is information about the customer that can be used to drive referrals and opportunities to increase proposals and close deals, support business growth by driving client loyalty and, ultimately, provide insightful information that can be used to offer hyper-personalized client experiences.

Customer expectations are always on the rise, and trends show a preference for convenience as well as control. The successful implementation of CRM plays a significant role in meeting these expectations, provided financial services firms know exactly what they hope to accomplish.

Vertical CRM and Customer Expectations

When one refers to personalization or hyper-personalization in financial services, what one is referring to is the deepening of engagement. Vertical CRM solutions understand that industries have specific needs, as do customers engaging with these industries.

In Wealth Management, for example, personalization begins with understanding how and when an advisor should engage with a customer. The nature of this engagement is also important because this could be a conversation about a portfolio alone or market movements in general. In Private Banking, other questions involve how a customer is to be addressed, what their profile is like in terms of objectives and risk tolerance, and what their goals are.

In Corporate Banking, factors that need to be taken into account include an understanding of internal coverage teams, the lending situation and financing needs of clients, cash flow forecasting, prediction and treasury management monitoring, key financial statement data, and benchmark comparisons to competitors. Lastly, in commercial banking, there needs to be an understanding of internal coverage teams, the lending situation and financing needs of clients, cash flow situation and treasury management monitoring, key financial statement data, behavior patterns such as when salaries are paid, and benchmark comparisons to competitors.

Most modern CRM solutions make it easier than ever for firms to offer a personalized approach to customers. What gives NexJ an edge is its Vertical CRM created and deployed specifically for particular financial services organizations. To find out more about what makes us different, why not get in touch with one of our experts today?