Across financial services – industries such as banking, wealth management, and insurance – the need for greater personalization has been a theme for several years. Fueled by consumers’ willingness to share their data in return for timely and relevant experiences, personalization requires continually learning about the customer and applying this knowledge into the relationship and creating authentic, individualized experiences.

Your brand is the beacon of authenticity for a personal experience. What does your brand portray to the market? In the financial services industry, security, stability, and protection are foundational brand values from which to deliver customer experiences. From these key values, customer journeys and the experiences they deliver bring these brand values to life for the consumer. With an increasing comfort with digital technology within financial services, firms must challenge traditional operating models and leverage digital tools to create an authentic relationship and earn (and retain) trust.

Customers engage with companies that demonstrate authentic knowledge of their relationship. Successful financial services firms will capitalize on their robust sets of operational data to create actionable insights across a connected digital ecosystem and deliver integrated, seamless, tailored customer experiences.

Elements of Delivering a Personalized Experience

How?

We believe there are three essential elements to delivering a personalized experience for consumers (both B2C and B2B):

Know – Data and Analytics Relevant to the Customer. Understand and navigate your vast digital data to make smarter, more informed business decisions.
Learn – Preferences and Interactions. Integrate and optimize your systems and processes, and use the right tools to enhance productivity.
Tell – Authentic, Relevant Brand Messages and Experiences. Create meaningful connections across every touchpoint that help acquire, engage, and retain your customers.

The connection between technology and consumers in financial services has never been more relevant. As digital natives begin to make up the majority of the U.S. population (just over half of the U.S. population is considered Millennial or younger, as of July 2019), the demand for personalization grows. With sound data and good process design, technology offers the infinite potential to drive competitive advantages for financial services through personalized experiences.

Financial Services + Salesforce

Automating better customer engagements starts with selecting the right CRM platform. Salesforce Financial Services Cloud is purpose built to meet the needs of the financial services industry. The data model, field names, workflows, and AI-augmented business intelligence will help you better understand your customer.

Salesforce capabilities extend across the financial services value chain of selling, servicing, and fulfilling financial commitments.

Consider:

Marketing automation through Salesforce Marketing Cloud extends the capabilities of the Financial Services Cloud across digital touchpoints.
The ability to create branded customer portals through Salesforce Experience Cloud enables self-service and a deeper connect with your customer.
All interactions build a complete view of your customer leveraging Salesforce Customer Data Platform (CDP) capabilities.
Industry-specific workflows and built-in document tracking give you a complete solution using Salesforce Industries.

Over the next several weeks, our Financial Services and Salesforce teams will be co-authoring a series of blogs to show how applying the Salesforce solution to common financial services industry situations can create an improved customer and user experience, while driving internal efficiencies across the organization. Stay tuned for more insights on a bi-weekly basis and reach out to our team with any questions or deeper conversations on the topics presented!

Johnathon Rademacher, Salesforce Principal; Paul Fischer, Senior Solution Architect and Salesforce Financial Services Industry Lead; and Scott Albahary, Director and Chief Strategist, Financial Services Industry Team, contributed to this post.