Salesforce has expanded its financial services offerings built specifically for banking, wealth management, and insurance institutions. Salesforce for Financial Services now offers more targeted and trusted automation and AI, powered by Client 360 to help every team unlock insights, deliver great customer service, and drive operational efficiencies – whether they deal directly with customers, underwrite loans, or manage administrative duties like human resources.
A new Salesforce survey of more than 2,000 consumers shows that financial services customers increasingly prefer digital experiences. In fact, 78 per cent of banking customers now establish their first connection with a financial institution via a website or app. However, the experience of being a customer in the digital age isn’t matching up. On average, fewer than 15 per cent of customers across banking, insurance, and wealth management feel that their financial needs are being anticipated.
With Salesforce for Financial Services innovations — including customer data platform, intelligent virtual assistant, intelligent agent desktop, customer service coordination, and analytics for financial services — firms can better serve their customers for life and boost satisfaction in this new digital economy.
“Financial services institutions are trying to keep pace with the digital acceleration that occurred as a result of the pandemic,” said Eran Agrios, SVP and GM, financial services at Salesforce. “At the same time, consumers are demanding more tailored services. New Client 360 capabilities are designed to meet these complex needs head-on, creating more efficiency across internal teams. This gives employees and customers the time and tools they need for a better experience overall.”
Scale personalised service with automation and connected client data
Financial institutions can drive new efficiencies by automating complex tasks across employees, workflows, and systems. New features like proactive service and call deflection also help financial services firms reduce operating expenses while maintaining quality service experiences:
- Last year, Salesforce customers reported seeing a 27 per cent increase in case resolution using self-service, automation, and/or artificial intelligence, including Service Cloud-powered chatbots. Virtual assistant, an Einstein-powered chatbot solution for financial services, is designed to automate routine requests faster across digital channels, like text and messenger platforms, so agents can focus on tasks that require human interaction.
- With customer service coordination, service agents collaborate in Slack as their digital HQ to accelerate customer case resolution. Using automated workflows and custom bots, customer service coordination generates critical alerts and gathers customer data into a central Slack channel so teams can mobilise around time-sensitive requests, such as fraud incidents, trade execution, and claims processing. For example, service agents at brokerages supporting high net worth individuals who are having trouble executing a large trade can quickly bring the right brokers into a single channel to quickly address the client’s case.
- Customer data platform (CDP) helps marketing teams at financial services institutions unify their customer data from different sources into a client profile using clicks, not code. This helps teams deliver personalised engagement at scale across every channel, including email, mobile, advertising, and the Web. And, with enhanced streaming insights and data actions, transactional emails, journeys, and 1:1 advisor interactions can be triggered in real time. For example, a bank’s marketing and sales teams can use CDP to unify data across channels and identify individuals who are engaging with mortgage-related content. The marketing team then creates a ‘first-time home buyer’ mortgage segment and engages them with personalised advertising and emails. With that complete, the mortgage advisor can then see if a client interacted with the campaign and reach out in real time to see if they need advising around buying their first home.
Deliver faster service with a unified desktop, actionable insights, and embedded workflows
Financial institutions can now unlock insights that anticipate and properly address customer needs in the channel where they have sought support. Features include pre-built and AI-embedded dashboards to deliver insights to employees:
- With intelligent agent desktop, agents can unlock valuable customer insights without ever leaving the console page. Features such as customer identity verification, which helps agents reduce the risk of fraud, and customer record alerts, which surfaces important issues that the customer may not even know about when they first call in, help to deliver faster, more comprehensive service.
- Analytics for financial services helps financial services institutions see and understand their customer’s data with data-driven insights to make better business decisions faster, ultimately working to deliver more predictable revenue and deepen client engagement.
- With customer address change automation, service agents can expect more integrated validation, routing, and data ingestion processes across systems associated with address changes.
Extending Salesforce for financial services innovations through the Salesforce Partner Ecosystem
Salesforce has an extensive partner ecosystem providing unique expertise and solutions for the global financial services industry. ISV partners such as Rocket Mortgage, Broadridge, and nCino extend and complement Salesforce for Financial Services.
Additionally, consulting partners Accenture, Slalom, 8Squad, Gerent, Globant, Silverline, West Monroe, and VASS specialise in financial services. They are equipped to implement these solutions tailored to individual customer needs, creating great customer experiences such as digital self-service and agent engagement, along with improving efficiency across the enterprise.
