This issue has been inspired by one of my blog visitor comment on my article about my financial crisis solutions. Actually, I have already written a similar post on how a strong customer relationship management could help French bank La Societe Generale to go through the crisis.
As the financial market system is questioned and people are seeking for alternative way of doing business, customer oriented business and an approach based on customer equity are attractive.
But here, the question is more precise, and is about CRM softwares. Therefore, I will provide you some examples on how owning a great CRM software with the proper customer relationship management strategy could help banks during the crisis.
- Communicating with your customers: As your customers are more and more concerned about the financial health of financial institutions, thanks to a great data base + the proper tool, you could send alerts (whether via emails, RSS feeds, Twitts and/or text messages) to your customers to give them updates with your status.
- Checking unusual movements on your account: If your customers are getting nervous about a potential bankruptcy of the bank, you could see people taking their money out of their accounts, which could drive the bank to big problems of liquidity. Therefore, you could configure your CRM tool in order to get some alerts when people are taking big amounts of money out, in order to get in contact with them (emails or phone calls) in order to calm them down and try to convince them to keep the money where it belongs.
- Providing tremendous opportunities to your clients: As the crisis continues to unfold, some people can see great opportunities coming up in the market. Let's not forget that the biggest fortunes have been made during crisis. If stocks are low right now, they'll increase very fast when the crisis will be over. Therefore, you could use the CRM tools to shape targeted marketing campaings (emailing, phoning, + mailing). That could actually be a great opportunity ton convince prospects that don't trust their banks anymore to join you.
- Managing customer's questions flow: During crisis times, people tend to need information to feel more secure. Therefore you should expect an increase in the amount of in calls for your call center or customer service. A great customer relationship management could help you managing the flow with ease and limit the waiting time and thus increase customers' satisfaction.
- Secure the banks business models: Banks are under attack. They have financial problems due to the financial market meltdown. Banks have invested their money in the market and now see these investments getting lower. But banks should also consider that they have some great assets that did not depreciate: Their clientele. That is where they get their money from. Therefore, having developed a great customer relationship strategy means they can get business out of their data base. As a bank, for your institutional communication, you should communicate on your ability to generate business out of your customers, and therefore limit the depreciation of your market shares.
