The buzzwords you keep on hearing today revolve around creating tailored customer experiences to satisfy the needs of those ever-changing customer expectations.
Living in a ‘Digitally OnDemand’ generation has trickled down into financial services and as a result of Covid, it has accelerated. Whether you’re an Insurance Company, Bank, Lender, or Investment Manager, you know that having a front-end for customers, brokers, institutional investors or any third party to log into has become paramount to offering an exciting and compelling proposition for your business.
Companies now, more than ever, understand the value of offering online communities for stakeholders and the significant positive impact they have. Whether that’s creating knowledge bases for quick queries and answers to alleviate the burden on support teams to providing partner portals for new incoming business. The online user experience must be clean, quick and to the point. And the result? You'll get a better response from your stakeholders if you create a community that's inviting and relevant to them.
All this sounds obvious, I know, but what makes a great community or tailored experience from a front-end user perspective within financial services? Well, traditionally these have always been clunky, expensive, and rigid technologies impossible to integrate and arduous to maintain. Keeping with the theme of buzzwords, the key to creating great online communities is simple: agile, flexible, tailored yet easy to edit and modify.
These online digital portals are now big differentiators between companies and their competitors, either positively or negatively. The question to ask is what makes your business different? In the financial world, tools such as Salesforce Experience Cloud create seamless online communities using the World’s Number 1 CRM platform. The continued investment into the platform has meant that tailored communities encompassing the below are now easily achievable:
On-boarding:
- Easily onboard external stakeholders using Experience cloud. Quickly verify and approve personal documents, as well as credit history using integrations into credit bureaus, such as Experian and ID Verifications like Onfido. Use E-Signature solutions to digitally capture signatures and any additional information.
Secure Document Transfer:
- Exchange important documentation and information via secured encrypted portals, ensuring regulatory compliance and clear audit trails on data received. Gone are the days of waiting and losing important information via the post.
Knowledge base
Communities can also be used as online support and group discussion tools. Create a knowledge base for your external stakeholders that can have quick and easy access to resources and frequently asked questions. A common example also includes online forums where individuals can post questions and queries or find the latest relevant articles on the topic.
Dynamic Training & Learning
- Create fun, interactive learning experiences that include gamification and rewards for any learning achieved for your teams or external stakeholders. No more boring PDFs to house learning, dynamic training ensure that individuals get the most out of the courses they enrol in.
Virtual interactions
- Easily integrate voice & video chat into your communities so any customer or external stakeholder can interact with the support team or a member of the sales & relationship team. Create virtual rooms to collaborate between clients and customers for best practices and customer satisfaction.
Marketplace Catalogue
- Create an online marketplace for your customers to access new or existing product offerings. More and more financial service companies are now offering tailored products in a market-style environment to their existing customer base, allowing any customer to quickly select and enquire about new products they may wish to explore.
Product tracking
- Much like customers can now track their deliveries of packages and food, financial service customers and external stakeholders can now track the progress and stage of their respective product, whether that’s a loan application, investments or any previous history and interaction they’ve had.
Tailored Reports & Dashboards
- Create tailored reports and dashboards that are relevant to the stakeholder at hand. Whether that’s how much business a broker has brought in, or keeping track of your investment portfolio you can create custom reports that fit the stakeholder's needs.
And much more..
In this way, the community portal can service much more than its intended use. They create cross-selling, value-added opportunities that lead to increased customer satisfaction.
So, Why should you Implement Salesforce Experience Cloud and create an online community?
Over the years, Merkle has specialised in delivering unique online portals and developed a number of specific communities for the Financial Services sector. Our in-house graphics team work with clients to deliver the look and feel that always matches the client and customers’ expectation. These solutions empower self-service and provide a more seamless and convenient experience for all external stakeholders to interact with your business.
Centralising data, workflows and processes in one place means that you can connect with the relevant parties quickly and directly. In doing so, customers will have a positive experience with your business and will keep coming back for more.
By providing self-service functionality, your team also saves time. You can then reallocate this time to focus more on growth opportunities. It optimises your daily business functions to make complex processes in traditional methods easier and focus your teams on the strategic work at hand.
It also helps you to scale your business. This allows you to innovate faster, adapt to changing customer needs, spread your message more quickly across multiple channels and develop your business faster. The insights provided by Salesforce can help your team to develop more informed strategies.
Online communities are valuable tools for businesses. If you’re looking for a way to create a tailored, unique stakeholder experience and differentiate in the market, then an online community using Salesforce Experience Cloud might be just what you need.