Crm in the Banking Industry

The five functions of CRM are sales, marketing, support, finance and executive. Some examples that would fall in the sales category would be lead/prospect generation, qualification, distribution, tracking, analysis, reporting, meeting planning, proposal generation and support, and competitive analysis. Some examples of marketing would be campaign management, literature fulfillment, marketing penetration and segmentation, event planning, analysis & reporting, database marketing, list management, product development and support, and RFP support. RFP categorizes customers in detail through three aspects recency, frequency, and monetary. Examples of support would be phone/web/email interactions, help desk, order entry, statements and invoices, credit and collections, web self-service, live-chat, problem resolution, customer implementation, and field support. Examples of finance would be customer profitability analysis, pipeline reporting, statistical analysis, and product launches. Examples that would fall in the executive category would be sales & marketing reporting, analysis, trends, graphs, and summary. Every function of CRM is considered important to a company in implementing a successful CRM system. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is a customer-centric business strategy with the goal of maximizing profitability, revenue, and customer satisfaction. Technology to support CRM initiatives must be integrated as part of an overall customer-centric strategy. Many CRM initiatives have failed because implementation was limited to software installation without alignment to a customer-centric strategy (http://wikipedia.org/wiki/Customer_relationship_management).

The chart below shows the functions that CRM is involved in as mentioned above. (http://crm.manufacturer-supplier.com/)

The goal of CRM is to help businesses use technology and human resources to have a better understanding of the behavior of customers and the value of those customers. Implementing a CRM system can be very expensive. A study in year 2001 survey of more than 1,600 business and IT professionals, conducted by The Data Warehousing Institute found that close to 50% had CRM project budgets of less than $500,000. That would appear to indicate that CRM doesn't have to be a budget-buster. However, the same survey showed a handful of respondents with CRM project budgets of over $10 million (http://crm.manufacturer-supplier.com/). The fail rate of implementing a CRM system successfully is very high. The fail rate is between 35-75%. Although there is a 35-75% fail rate, companies are still heavily spending their money in trying to implement a CRM system successfully. If a company succeeds it can provide better customer service, make call centers more efficient, cross sell products more effectively, help sales staff close deals faster, simplify marketing and sales processes, discover new customers, and increase customer revenues.

CRM in the banking industry is a critical part in really getting to know the customer. By having a CRM system in place you can gather an enormous amount of information from customers. You can find likes and dislikes about how they do their banking. You can find out what type of balances they keep in their bank portfolios.