A fundamental aspect of creating marketing campaigns is building a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) strategy around segmentation. This involves understanding your customer base, categorising them into distinct segments, and tailoring your activities and approach to meet the unique needs of each of segment. Here, Go Live Data’s CEO Adam Herbert provides his expert guidance on developing a CRM strategy around it, and touching on what can also be specific to the financial services sector.
Define your objectives
The first inevitable thing to do is to clearly outline your CRM goals. These might include improving customer satisfaction, increasing customer retention, boosting sales, or something else related specifically to your customer base or your business.
Understanding your customers
The most invaluable and accurate way to understand your customers, is to collect and analyse data about every one of them. The sort of information to collect is likely to feature around demographic information about where they live, statistics and data about their purchasing behaviour, their communication preferences, for example, do they respond to email, do they receive a regular newsletter or have they responded to a social media advert. The information will also include their interaction history, such as how many times they have visited your website, how many interactions have they made this way and what is the average amount of money they spend in each transaction. These are just some basic examples, however, it can become much more technical, depending on the nature of your financial business.
Segmentation
To define the segments of your customer base, you must create categories based on certain, common characteristics, and on demographics, geography, behaviour and any other relevant factors.
Within the Financial Services sector for example, segments are most likely to include demographics, such as age, income level and occupation. Behavioural segmentation about each person could involve, the type of investments they make, (or don’t, as the case may be), the levels of risk they have shown to take, as well as their transaction history. This could include the number of times they take out money, pay for things or put money into their bank accounts. Not forgetting how many times they go over drawn if the business is a bank or building society. It may also entail how many bank accounts they might have, and so on. Another example of financial segmentation is often geographical, which will relate to information about where a customers may live in relation to the branch of a bank. But more than that nowadays, it is likely to relate to the locations of the cashpoints that have been used by a specific customer.
Tailored to financial services
Tailoring CRM systems to the needs of financial services is key to fostering client relationships and sustaining business success. In an industry where trust, precision, and personalised services are paramount, a well-crafted CRM – tailored specifically for financial services, can streamline operations, enhance customer interactions and drive strategic decision-making.
Financial institutions deal with a host of complex transactions, regulatory requirements, and diverse customer profiles, making customisation essential. A tailored CRM system enables professionals in the industry to manage client information efficiently, to track financial transactions, and ensure compliance is upheld within the finance industry maintain security standards.
A tailored approach will also facilitate personalised communication, allowing financial institutions to provide targeted and timely advice, address individual customer needs and ultimately build trust. The ability to integrate data from various financial channels empowers organisations to gain a good understanding of customer behaviours and preferences, to allow for the delivery of effective financial solutions. In an age when customer expectations are extremely high, the customisation of CRM systems is not just an advantage strategically, but a necessity for remaining competitive and meeting the demands of the industry.
Strategies
Customers can be targeted with financial product recommendations or investment advice based on their profiles. It’s possible to customise workflows for loan origination, credit approval, and other financial processes so it’s important to ensure that the CRM supports documentation and collaboration for credit-related activities. A CRM can also provide mobile access for financial advisors who need to access client information on the go, providing the mobile interface is secure and compliant with regulations.
The right technology
Implement tech to build a system for tracking and adding regulatory changes quickly, along with alerts and notifications to inform users of industry updates. Remember that customisation should be done in accordance with industry regulations, so it’s essential to keep the system up to date with the latest compliance requirements. This is another benefit of outsourcing to a specialist data company to provide this service for you.
It’s essential that your system is regularly evaluated for its effectiveness, which can be done through the metrics by looking at customer retention rates, customer lifetime value, and satisfaction scores. There are many other ways of doing this but these are some common examples. This will allow for the continued refinement of your CRM strategy based on customer feedback, market changes, and the evolving needs of your business. Also, by using the essential method of Customer Journey Mapping, you will gain an even more in-depth understanding of your customers’ journey to identify touchpoints for effective CRM implementation.
To conclude, good CRM recognises the uniqueness of each customer segment and tailors’ interactions accordingly. In the financial services industry, where trust and personalisation are crucial, effective segmentation can lead to improved customer satisfaction, loyalty, and business success. Regularly reviewed and adapted, your strategy will stay aligned with evolving customer expectations and industry trends.
