Things have to change. Cross selling is not going to happen simply by installing new CRM technology. A corresponding movement from a transaction mentality to the underlying CRM principle of focusing on the long-term relationship is required. What does this mean for financial services? Stop pushing products and start building relationships.

The Consumer’s Perspective

Let’s take a look from the consumer’s perspective. Financial illiteracy is alive and well, especially with baby boomers. Next, throw in brand confusion–the convergence in financial services has produced new players, company names, and products. Everybody is now playing in everybody else’s backyard. Insert the media’s frequent coverage on retirement planning and increased advertising dollars being spent targeting “the confused generation.” Now, throw in the fact that there is widespread incoherence around what the term “financial planner” even means. At its best, this situation is overwhelming to prospects, current clients, and maybe even your employees. At its worst, people are sticking their heads in the sand and saying, “leave me alone!”

Marketing financial products and services has always been an information and relationship sale. You are in the personal finance education business, whether you like it or not. And it’s not nearly as sexy as the ad agencies make it seem. No matter how many sailboats, moonlight beaches, or mansions your advertising agency plasters in print and on the airways, selling financial services and products makes prospects and clients deal with issues with which many are uncomfortable. It is no wonder that selling financial services demands a set of tools that moves far beyond the info dump and plethora of brochures that dominate the industry.

The Financial Firm’s Perspective

Let’s now take a look from the financial firms’ perspective. Mergers and acquisitions have been in full throttle. Corporate identities are still being created. Not only is there more competition, but it’s possible that the more serious competitors are residing within your own company. CRM is slowly permeating the lexicon of the financial world. Yet, with a few notable exceptions, financial firms lag far behind industries like retailing and airlines in data mining, making it almost impossible today to build a single integrated view of their customers.

On either side of the spectrum, change is the dominant theme. So given the current state of affairs, how do you execute a CRM strategy that promotes cross selling and up selling? How can you increase the chances that your CRM strategy will stick? Here are some of the best conditions for selling:
When the sales force has complete access to a particular customer’s need or near-term future needs.

When the sales force knows and understands what cross selling and up selling mean in your firm.

When staff, partners, and suppliers work together to deliver what is promised.

When leadership teams agree on how to lead the transformation necessary to change culture, structures, systems, metrics, and behaviors to promote cross selling.

The Softer Side of CRM

All of the above conditions require more than technology solutions and product knowledge to execute. They require the softer side of the CRM equation: relationship building with customers, prospects, your boss, your peers, other departments, partners, and suppliers. If you want to solve the business challenge of cross selling and up selling, you’ll need to:
Build trust. For financial planners, brokers or agents, that might require working with prospects in new ways. For corporate or home office staff, that might include building bridges with other departments or field staff.
Develop a network of helpful relationships that will act as “oil” for the CRM machine. Research shows that the more helpful relationships there are, the more information is willingly shared. For financial planners, brokers or agents, that might mean prospecting in new ways. For corporate or home office staff, it might mean articulating and agreeing on a practical policy of real-time knowledge and information sharing.
Build crucial social currency both with customers and with people inside the organization. The core of any social or economic relationship is trust. It’s all about influencing others to take action in the direction we want them to go.

It’s a Process

Relationship building is a process of trust building. It is also an iterative process. It is a process of layering…the relationship starts at arm’s length, then grows more intimate as the trust builds, passing little tests along the way. This applies to all relationships–with customers, employees, peers, partners, and even competitors. Your internal experts in technology, marketing, corporate identity, operations, and sales must grow to learn how to be content experts in the business of relationship building. In today’s environment, CRM is screaming for experts on relationship building. Managing customer relationships can only happen after they’ve been properly built.

One word of caution for financial services firms as they march forward to the CRM tune: don’t worry so much about selling the features and benefits of your products. You’re already really good at that. Start worrying about how you can build relationships with your customers and prospects in new and different ways that will allow for cross selling and up selling. Remember the aphorism: A sure sign of insanity is doing the same old thing while expecting new and different results.

Originally published by CRMGuru.com , a service from Front Line Solutions, ©1998-2001

One bank that has led the innovation agenda is Barclays.

In fact in the last few months Barclays announced the introduction of biometric finger scanning, as well as video banking. These innovations should improve both the customer experience and overall security measures… so are win-win for Barclays and its customers alike.

Video banking in particular seemed to take a few people by surprise. However, it makes perfect sense, and is likely to become commonplace across the industry over the next few years. In this respect, Barclays is leading the industry, and should be congratulated.

The Challenging part!

The challenge, as all financial services companies know, isn’t injecting a bit of innovation here or sprinkling a bit of magic dust here.

Everyone struggles with embedding innovation into complex multichannel environments, constrained by organisational silos, competing executive priorities and balanced against a ‘must do’ regulatory programme portfolio.

Providing a consistently good customer experience across multiple customer channels is hard now. In the future, it will can only really become harder!

One bank customer review really jumped out. A Business Banking customer, told us about his difficulty in getting in touch with his bank.

In his review, the customer started his customer journey via a broken web contact form, then went to Twitter, where after approximately 20 messages, a member of the business banking team, with no apparent knowledge of the Twitter conversation picked-up the phone. The customer labels this experience as ‘the general mess of their communications.’

Not so long ago, the use of twitter for many financial services organisation was in itself seen as a big innovative step. Engaging customers through multiple channels is great! But in this case the customer experience was clearly disjointed, and via Twitter Pete received replies from three other banks offering to take his business instead!

In this case, the customer’s expectation was clearly not met, and multichannel engagement did not work.

However, the future could be very bright!

The pace of innovation will likely not slow down. In fact, we believe that there is some pretty inspiring innovation not too far away that will really please customers. This has the potential to be great news!

Financial services firms will have to be better at implementing innovation, but also at performing all the core processes (e.g. making and receiving payments). After all, a beautifully designed app that doesn’t work really isn’t going to please customers for too long!

Innovation won’t build sustainable advantage

The innovation wave is picking up power. All organisations will join the wave, as no one can afford to be left behind. Some organisations will lead the charge, and others will do well to not fall too far behind.

That said, looking across the industry, all financial services companies need to get better at communicating, managing customer expectations and being more open. This is probably the hardest nut of all to crack, but vital if sustainable competitive advantage is to be gained. We argue that it should also be central to the innovation agenda.

Customers want to love the brands they shop, eat, travel and bank with! Innovation in financial services isn’t enough. To truly build sustainable advantage, financial services organisations must lead the customer trust and transparency agenda.

Programmers throughout the United Kingdom have a variety of industries in which they can work. IT consultancies and firms that contract professionals to corporations can be lucrative and dynamic. Defence, aerospace, and engineering firms need programmers who are interested in learning about their specific needs and developing IT solutions appropriate for these needs. However, one of the best areas of entry into the job market for a young programmer is in the financial service sector. Programmers need to understand what prospective jobs in financial services require before taking the leap into this lucrative industry.

One aspect of financial service programming jobs in the United Kingdom is creating proprietary systems. Banks and financial advising firms need to have a variety of programs to keep track of funds, account information, and other data. While some banks contract out these services to outside IT firms, many have hired programmers to develop in-house systems. Programmers who are hired to create these systems often have to complete their technical work and then provide training and the new system to employees. In this way, programming jobs in the financial service sector can be interesting and engaging for an IT professional.

Perhaps the biggest aspect of the programming job in a financial services firm is providing updates and corrections to IT systems. Programmers often monitor transactions in real time to determine if there are any glitches or bugs that need to be fixed in the system. As well, programmers will usually run a variety of diagnostic tests and assessments on a system daily to determine if any problems develop as data accumulates in the office network. Programming jobs in banks and financial advising firms are often about patience, reviewing systems, and keep an eye out for the smallest of problems.

Finally, programming jobs in the financial services sector often require efforts at outreach to non-IT professionals. Bank personnel, financial advisors, and stock traders alike are more familiar with their specific job responsibilities than IT issues. As such, programmers who are fixing problems or installing new updates need to keep professionals updated on what is going on. Programmers often need to send out e-mails or go around to individual workers affected, depending on the size of the office. In these communications, a programmer has to explain why the system is down or what they are doing that is causing a slowdown in the network. However, programmers should also explain the consequences of updates to help keep their colleagues in the loop.