Choosing The Best CRM For Financial Services

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solutions have become an important component for financial companies at every stage of tracking customer’s journeys from client acquisition to retention. CRM for financial advisors offers financial firms such as commercial banks, loan advisors, stockbrokers, investment advisors, insurance companies, etc. a centralized base to establish, maintain, and strengthen the relationships with their customers.

Just like with every other business, customers are the most important element of financial companies, and maintaining strong and long-lasting relationships is important for the success of any financial firm. Financial advisors and institutions use CRM solutions for client-prospecting activities, outreach campaigns, managing documentation, scheduling meetings, analyzing customer data, maintaining sales pipeline, performing know your customer (KYC) verification, and more.

CRM for financial services is powered by cutting-edge technology to help financial service firms to establish strong customer relationships using structured communications, analyzing data to get key insights on customers and prospects, workflow automation, lead generation and conversion, and increasing the profitability of the company.

What Is A CRM For Financial Advisors?

A CRM for financial advisors will still retain the standard CRM functionality such as contact and pipeline management whilst adding useful special features like investment tracking and compliance management. Let’s have a look at how exactly an industry-specific CRM can assist a finance consultant:

How Do CRM Solutions Help Financial Advisors?

Enhanced Activity Visibility

You can keep track of each client interaction you’ve had with the help of CRM software. This involves communicating with them using all methods, including social media, meetings, phone conversations, emails, and texts. Client transaction records are also displayed in financial CRMs, making following the development of investments simpler. 

Improved Analytics

Businesses, especially those that provide financial services, heavily rely on data. Financial CRMs will make it easier to Monitor and analyze the effectiveness of your sales and marketing activities. You’ll be able to see how each client’s case is progressing as it goes through the pipeline. And based on the gathered data, customized reports can be created using analytical intelligence. 

Automated Workload

By automating some of your repetitive work processes, you can easily free up time for tasks that require your utmost attention. You’ll be able to put more of your efforts into things like studying financial tactics and investing prospects. AI and machine learning will expedite processes like new client onboarding and sending email follow-ups and reminders. Additionally, they can help with sales procedures including completing purchase and sell orders.

Schedule Tracking

Financial CRMs are good for monitoring past activity and will assist you in making future plans as well. CRMs will reserve a slot in your calendar if a client asks that you call them on a specific day. And before the call, you will get a reminder containing all the information required for the client and the meeting. 

Benefits Of Using A CRM In Banking And Financial Services

The benefits a good CRM can provide to a financial service provider are numerous: 

Saving Time

Financial advisors more than anyone understand that their clients’ success is directly correlated to their own. Thus, their primary objective is to boost the value of the customer’s portfolio. CRM programs enable specialists to devote their attention fully to client interactions and financial research, automating monotonous tasks.

Better Prospect Visibility

You can monitor all your networking activity with the use of CRM software. You can monitor when and how you initially connected by using capabilities like activity history. CRM also keeps you informed of the potential and known wants of each client, offering ideas for how to move prospects gradually through your sales funnel.

Enhanced Financial Analytics

For the financial services sector, CRMs often include business analytics. A huge number of connections equals a wealth of important information. You can gather data on previous trading and planning activity using the CRM software and then utilize it to get actionable insights. 

Strong Marketing/Sales Capabilities

Finance experts need to remain in regular contact with their marketing and sales. In order to grow, you must use advertising strategies like email marketing or social media, and after that, it is critical to have sales teams ready to talk to generated prospects. 

Improved Customer Satisfaction 

Financial advisors don’t typically rely on one-time investment consultations. Following up and forming long lasting connections is crucial. However, in a long client relationship in the financial sphere, it’s inevitable that there will be some downs. And when things don’t go according to plan, clients will count on excellent support from their advisors, which a financial CRM can help provide.

Types Of CRM Systems 

CRM systems can vary in some aspects and thus be more suitable for one company than another, depending on the needs and focus of the business. There are three types of CRM systems.

Collaborative CRM Systems

The primary feature of a collaborative CRM is to integrate the marketing team, sales reps, and the customer support agents of the organization. Collaborative CRM systems are the best for big financial institutions such as insurance companies, and banks because they deal with a lot of different departments each having separate teams. Usually in bigger organizations, there is a huge gap between different departments like marketing, sales, and customer relations due to different teams, structures, goals, and activities. The customers are the only thing in common between all these departments. Collaborative CRM for financial services provides a way to share information across different departments using real-time data to work together efficiently. 

Collaborative CRM systems allow all the departments to access all the updated data of different departments. This ensures a seamless customer interaction as the customer agent has all the data related to the customers who interacted before with the marketing or sales team. This brings clarity and clears confusion between the customer and the organization. 

Operational CRM Systems

An operational CRM system smoothes a company’s processes for customer relationships. Operational CRM in banking and financial services offers tools that help to understand the whole customer journey by simplifying it into different stages, from the moment of the first interaction of the customer to the point where the lead becomes your customer. If you are a loan advisor, insurance company, investment advisor, and another financial services provider dealing with significantly longer customer journeys than other businesses, operational CRM systems can be a great option to manage customer relationships. 

Operational CRM for financial advisors offers automation features that enable you to bring efficiency to the whole human resource management. It helps to save time on tedious work and allows you to invest your time into more creative aspects of the customer acquisition and retention process.

Analytical CRM Systems

The key feature of analytical CRM systems is to help you analyze the customer data to obtain insights. Businesses in today’s world work with large amounts of data and analytical CRM systems help you to analyze these data and provide you insights that allow you to make better-informed business decisions. Analytical CRM systems offer reports, visualization dashboards, and insights to understand customer behavior as well as all the other relevant data based on your business needs. With the help of this data, you can improve customer experience, increase sales and also improve after-sale services, depending on the needs of the customer. 

Analytical CRM for financial services can be quite useful for financial advisors because the finance niche includes a vast range of numerical data such as customer spends, past investments, savings, credit scores and so much more. 

Key Features of CRM Solutions for Financial Advisors 

Reporting and Analytics

Just like with every other business, data analytics is paramount for financial advisors to make critical data-driven business decisions. CRM for financial services offers numerous reports and insights on customers such as acquisition, behavior, retention, etc. that are used to analyze the performance of the complete customer journey. Analytical CRM solutions also allow you to create your own custom reports using the relevant data based on your business needs. 

Activity Tracking

Activity tracking allows you to manage the day-to-day activity of your firm. CRM for finance brokers and advisors allows you to create action items that serve as a to-do list. It allows you to manage all the activities that are planned, in progress or completed. Generally, financial brokers and advisors have a longer customer journey with many contact points between the company and customers. The activity tracking feature allows managers to check if no steps are missed and all the activities are completed on time. It also offers flexibility to add custom steps based on specific requirements from customers or the company’s side. It also makes it easier to delegate specific tasks to agents. 

Workflow Automation

Workflow automation allows you to streamline the customer relationship management processes from initiation to completion. In most financial advisors and broking firms, these customer relationship management workflows can be quite complex, which may include a lengthy process to get a client from start to finish. CRM solutions for financial advisors allow you to streamline your workflow with an option to customize each step based on certain needs and requirements. 

The CRM systems can automatically create a customer’s profile, add necessary tags that can be used for audience segmentation, create a list of pre-determined tasks as well as automatically schedule calls based on the agent’s availability. With the help of CRM, you can automate the process of task tracking, service monitor, or client segmentation. This gives you the possibility to outline your services and customize the services for individual clients. 

Financial services CRM also allows you to track the action items of all the customers and automatically notify the agent about a scheduled call, important reminders, due dates, etc. 

In-Built Calling and Outreaching

Financial advisors generally have to contact the customers several times, whether it’s about selling a service or providing it. Many CRM solutions for financial advisors offer in-built calling and outreaching features to avoid unnecessary time wastage by managing and operating separate software to contact the customers. The CRM system allows you to email or call your customers directly and also has a call recording and history feature and maintains all the records of the contact with the customers.

Integration With 3rd Party Products

Financial advisors use various software to operate and facilitate the services offered by the firm. CRM Systems require all the data that are stored within these softwares in order to work with maximum efficiency. CRM for finance brokers and advisors allows you to integrate the data with 3rd party products and software that can save a huge amount of time on lengthy work such as manually updating information in the CRM system.