Every bank wants to deliver a world-class experience to its clients, but like many other industries, the banking sector is experiencing unprecedented changes. However, even with all of the changes going on, there’s no shortage of demand for banking products. In fact, research from Deloitte shows that customers are demanding complex products and services such as mortgages and financial advice in addition to simple transactional activities. To meet these growing demands, banks will need to collect more and more customer data. At the same time, banks will need to keep up with the necessary data maintenance standards to get the needed value out of the data collected and perform the business operations their customers demand.
In this article, we will describe how companies in the banking sector can use data maintenance to their advantage and the hurdles they will need to overcome to get there.
Advantage 1: Gain a 360-Degree View of Your Customers
Today’s clients demand that financial institutions know them, guide them, and advise them based on industry expertise. They expect banks to deliver solutions that solve their current and future needs. However, due to siloed data, limitations of legacy systems, and paper-intensive processes, bankers cannot get a holistic view of their customers, which prevents them from providing guidance and suggesting new products that will suit each customer’s unique situation.
Salesforce offers solutions that can provide companies with 360-degree views of their customers through tools such as Einstein Activity Capture and Salesforce Inbox just to name a few. However, the tools offered by Salesforce are only as good as the data you put in them. Dirty data filled with duplicates, outdated or invalid information, and many other data quality issues will decrease the value you get from customer data and from Salesforce itself. For example, imagine having multiple records for the exact same contact inside Salesforce, each of which contains bits and pieces of information you need to create the 360-degree view that you need.
This is why you need to use a deduplication tool that will help you cleanse your data of duplicates. This will allow you to get a complete picture of the journey that each customer took, which will also improve your communication with them.
Advantage 2: Improved Team Efficiency
Providing a truly transformative customer experience starts with the employees themselves. While their end goal is to deliver one-to-one customer service and selling, this is only possible if the entire team is functioning at its full collaborative capacity. One of the obstacles preventing your team from achieving maximum efficiency is dirty data and the lack of technology to clean it up. For example, imagine multiple people selling or cross-selling to the same account who are not up to date on the latest details or two employees working on the same large account and not realize it. Imagine the information exchange and collaboration that could’ve taken place if they simply had visibility into each other’s roles.
Improving your data maintenance will allow your team to work more productively since they will be more confident in the data contained inside Salesforce and will not need to waste time double-checking the data or figuring out who’s working on what. This means more time speaking with leads and prospects and less time manually fixing customer data.
Advantage 3: Visibility Across the Funnel
One of the biggest problems companies in the banking industry have is dealing with the lack of a single location where employees can check deals in the pipeline and bankers’ current progress to goal. Nor does the broader team have a clear view of the deals on their plates. This means that it will take longer for sales inquiries and referrals to reach the right person and be acted on, the highest-priority leads aren’t scored as such and many other issues. Giving your team greater visibility into the sales funnel would give you an advantage since every decision-maker can quickly see open opportunities and leads at a glance from their own dashboards. Instead of countless follow-up emails and trying to gauge whether quarterly quotas are on track, you can have real data instead of best guesses at your fingertips.
Full visibility into the sales funnel means that your bankers can focus on what they do best: developing financial solutions for your clients, not hoping that they’re following up on the right deals.
Advantage 4: Improved Data Recovery
While data recovery may not seem like a big deal, when you have a business, everything revolves around data. There is nothing more important than making sure that data collected over time is safe and secure. In fact, 72% of businesses suffering a major data loss shut down within 24 months. In addition to this, the average cost of a data breach to a U.S. company, according to an IBM study, was $8.6 million – the highest in the world. That same study found that it could take 280 days – more than nine months – to identify and contain a data breach.
Accidents do happen and businesses have to be prepared to face them. Data recovery is a part of the plan that helps businesses get back on track. Database maintenance generates archival backups of critical data to enhance the data recovery process, making it easier for IT personnel to recover from disasters that damage their system.
Advantage 5: More Accurate Decision Making
Pretty much every organization, not only in the banking industry, strives to be data-driven which means that they want to use data to guide strategic business decisions that align with your goals, objectives, and initiatives. When organizations realize the full value of their data, that means everyone, regardless of their position, is empowered to make better decisions with data, every day. However, the difficulty here is that not only is the amount of information collected has never been greater, but it’s also more complex. This makes it difficult for organizations to manage and analyze their data. In fact, NewVantage Partners recently reported that 98.6% of executives indicate that their organization aspires to a data-driven culture, while only 32.4% report having success.
One of the reasons why so few companies achieve a data-driven culture is because of dirty data. When decision-makers identify a problem they need to solve, they are having trouble finding relevant and clean data. As a result, they waste a lot of time analyzing data that may not have an impact on the final decision. Being able to clean up your data and use all of the data you have to make better decisions will help you outmaneuver your competitors and stand out in a crowded marketplace.
Protect Your Company Investment by Deduplicating Your Data
In this article, we talked about some of the main advantages data maintenance can offer your businesses, but you will need the right tools to clean up your data. DataGroomr can help cleanse your Salesforce data of duplicates and invalid customer contact information, which will go a long way towards solving your data quality issues. We leverage machine learning to dedupe your data, which allows us to eliminate any time-consuming setup processes.
Try Datagroomr for yourself today with our free trial.
