Beyond Sales Force Automation

Improve collaboration and cross-selling across all lines of business.

Clients choose NexJ because they are looking for a highly integrated solution as a strategic investment in their business. Their primary goals typically include improving the customer experience and driving cross-sell and upsell. To accomplish these goals, commercial and corporate banks are looking for an integrated banker experience that uses an enterprise view of the customer to drive cross-system workflows and enable bankers to collaborate across channels, regions, and lines of business. This cannot be accomplished with simple sales force automation, but that is the typical starting point.

By implementing sales force automation, including opportunity management and account planning within a given region or line of business, with the banker’s productivity in mind, initial user adoption is good. NexJ recommends an extra step to lock in continued user adoption: integration. The goal of this step is to make the bankers net receivers of information by integrating the system to the back office. A net receiver of information gets more out of the system than they put in. By building a comprehensive view of the customer out of the integrated data, users have access to more and better information at their fingertips and don’t need to switch applications to service the customers.

Banker productivity can further be improved with the addition of intelligent features such as:

• Opportunity Approvals to streamline and automate the approval process.
• Client Onboarding with intelligent branching forms and approval workflows.
• NexJ News and Research Recommendations to match public news and private research to customer profiles.
• NexJ Publish to help bankers build personalized brands on social channels such as Twitter and LinkedIn.
• Intelligent agents to speed up daily tasks such as scheduling meetings, filing emails, and logging call reports.

With sales force automation implemented within a single region or line of business, many clients look to increase cross-selling by improving collaboration across multiple regions and lines of business. The region-specific views of each customer are combined together in rich hierarchies allowing for a complete view of the business that a firm is doing across a global customer. Global account planning and opportunity management ensure that all team members across the bank are working with the best interest of the customer and the firm in mind. Management dashboards provide the appropriate transparency for cross-bank referrals and ensure customer satisfaction and new revenue.

NexJ clients will also extend CRM into the call center to ensure a consistent customer experience regardless of which channel the customer chooses. It’s key that call center agents have full access to the comprehensive view of the customer and that bankers know intimately what the interactions are between the customer and the call center.

Marketing can get the same benefit from the enterprise view of the customer as the call center. With complete accurate information about the customer, marketing campaigns are more successful and, once again, the banker is completely aware of all interactions with a customer across the firm.

The ultimate goal of an enterprise view of the customer is to use the rich customer information for machine learning to better understand customers, their relationships, and trade corridors, and to identify patterns of actions that are proven to increase share of wallet. Firms use this data to recommend products and services for the account plan, based on buying patterns and the client’s existing products, and recommend the right steps and teams to close a deal.

Though sales force automation is important in increasing banker productivity, leveraging additional intelligence features and providing modern, digital tools, can also improve your customer experience and drive cross-sell and upsell. With an integrated solution that makes your bankers net receivers of information, they are able to track and be aware of all interactions their customers have with your firm through any channel. This allows you to improve collaboration throughout your organization which improves the customer experience and increases your share of wallet.

Author: Adam Edmonds

Vice President, Products

With almost 2 decades of experience developing customer management solutions in financial services and insurance, Adam Edmonds is responsible for establishing overall product vision and designing easy to use solutions that solve real market problems.

Adam is excited to share the lessons he has learned and his insights on where the industry is heading with readers of his blog. He encourages readers to join the discussion or reach out to him with their own insights, best practices, and solutions to industry challenges.