"Short-Term Profits and Long-Term Growth: Technology for Finding the Balance"

Reprinted from Windows on Financial Services emagazine:

Bankers around the globe are under increasing pressure to drive profits and reduce costs while still investing in technology solutions that help increase customer satisfaction and loyalty. Finding this balance is difficult at best, [and] our panelists will provide some sage advice to retail bankers who are seeking to strike this balance. Plus, these experts will give us their views on what are the biggest challenges to meeting these goals, and discuss which technologies show the most promise for delivering short-term profits, as well as for long-term growth.

Says Kirk Herrington, President and Founder, GaleForce Solutions Inc.,

"In many respects, short-term and long-term goals [in banking] revolve around the same needs of customer retention and increasing share of wallet. Financial institutions must be more attentive to their customers’ complex and ever-changing needs. In order to deepen product penetration rates, institutions have to understand individual and household situations, and offer the right products and services.

We believe that a long term commitment to customer service is the best strategy. Consistency across the board is key: consistent customer service; consistent customer communications; and consistent customer knowledge. This deep customer knowledge must apply across all channels – branch, call center, online, ATM, etc.

Many banks are saddled with a five percent or higher annual attrition rate. When financial institutions deploy GaleForce CRM for Financial Services, they have taken a big step in cutting this attrition figure and increasing wallet share. Account managers, financial advisors, lenders and others can all use GaleForce CRM to organize, present and track information about their customers and deliver stellar service.

With a well implemented change management and CRM solution, I’ve seen a bank consistently increase their AUM at 30% per year with essentially no increase in the number of customers. That is very impressive performance particularly when you realize the bank wasn’t reducing their fee structure thus ensuring continued good margins.

All of our code is developed on the Microsoft .NET Framework and our solution sits right on top of Microsoft Dynamics CRM to extend its functionality deep into the financial services industry. Just as importantly, it works within Microsoft Outlook which means that employees are already familiar with the interface and so end-user adoption rates are greatly enhanced. On just one screen, employees are provided with a 360-degree client view that makes it easy for them to better comprehend the overall customer relationship (on-book and off-book) and thereby better target opportunities to enhance loyalty, retention and build share of wallet.

While front-line staff like our system because it works the way that they work, senior managers can drill into executive reports to better understand both staff and customer performance. Plus, the IT department can quickly customize our application using the standard easy-to-use drag and drop customization tools within Microsoft CRM."

For the full story, see article in Windows on Financial Services http://www.windowsfs.com/TheMag/tabid/54/articleType/ArticleView/articleId/2152/Default.aspx).