Transforming customer experiences in financial services – A ProActive approach

Excellent customer service has become increasingly important in the financial services industry (FSI), where competition is high and reputation management is critical.

It has been earmarked as one of the foundations for business success, as companies which prioritise customer experience generate 60% higher profits, according to Gartner’s Leading on the Edge of Chaos report.

“FSI institutions are typically not very strong in terms of customer-centricity, even though they have cutting-edge systems for their products, payment services, financial planning, and risk management,” said Justin Adan, customer-centricity client lead at Mint Management Technologies, a technology consultancy and development company that specialises in customer relationship management (CRM).

“Dynamics 365 is a perfect solution for FSI organisations, because it can tie the information from their complex systems into a customer engagement model. This gives customer service representatives a full view of their customers as well as the FSI space.”

Dynamics 365

Dynamics 365 unifies enterprise resource planning (ERP) and CRM capabilities into applications that work together across sales, customer service, field service, operations, financials, marketing, and project service automation.

It includes solutions designed to help financial institutions achieve quantifiable results with a set of unified marketing and customer service capabilities.

“FSI organisations are traditionally quite product-oriented,” said Adan. “But with Dynamics 365 they can transform from transaction-centric businesses to customer-centric businesses.”

Dynamics 365 gives FSI institutions a holistic, 360-degree view of the customer, allowing users to track customer data and interactions within a single system, while giving brokers the information they need to deliver fast, personalised service.

Implementing a CRM system like Dynamics 365 for an FSI organisation isn’t without it’s challenges, however. “The objectives of the consulting, development, and internal teams aren’t always aligned,” said Adan. “Another challenge is to marry the customer-centric view and data to the FSI’s financial data to ensure operational efficiencies.”

The Mint ProActive

To overcome the challenges of implementing Dynamics 365, Mint introduced a mandatory ProActive offering, which is a consulting package to help clients get the most out of their CRM.

“Many consulting firms get technical immediately, and try to solve key problems without fully understanding the business, its needs, and how it operates,” said Adan. “Instead, we engage with all our clients to understand the overarching business, explain how we work, gain understanding on how they work, and then put together a combined team to ensure that we are all pulling in the same direction.”

Depending on the scope of the project, a ProActive can take between a few weeks to a few months, and includes debriefings, post-analysis, and learnings from over 15 years of CRM project experience to identify the critical early steps that determine the quality and impact of a project.

ProActive aims to align the project objectives with all key stakeholders, including business and IT, while creating clarity and a comprehensive understanding of the solution requirements, and structured planning and preparation for project success factors.

“We ensure that the context and environment of your CRM engagement is clearly established and includes input from the right players within your organisation,” said Adan. “Once we have that as a baseline, and all teams involved are speaking a common language and hold a similar vision, a successful implementation becomes much easier to achieve.”

For more information, visit the Mint Management Technologies website.

About Justin Adan

With a combined passion for marketing and technology Justin serves as a Solutions Architect for Microsoft Gold Partner Mint Group.

Enforcing customer centric practices and enabling next-generation experiences, Justin is responsible for integrating both Information systems and marketing to help drive Information-based commerce and decision systems across Africa.

Comprising more than 10 years of experience, he is specialised in SQL, Database Design and Analysis, CRM, ERP systems, Marketing Analysis and Customer Lifetime Value Analysis.