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Working With a Finance CRM

Find out how CRM software can transform your financial services company, whether you work in wealth management or investment banking.
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What Is a CRM for Financial Services?

CRM (customer relationship management) software helps businesses track interactions with their clients. While these software solutions have been around for decades, they are expanding and turning into mobile solutions with the growth of cloud-based models. 

The CRM industry is expected to reach $128.97 billion by 2028. If your firm isn’t using a CRM yet, it will be soon. 

In fact, a 2021 survey by Harvard Business Review found that 64% of financial service companies place “improving customer experience (CX)” as a top-five priority in the near future. 

The Features of a CRM

The features of a CRM vary depending on the product’s core audience. Still, they do have some common factors to look for as a financial organization.

  • Customer Tracking: CRMs track customer interactions over multiple platforms and channels. This includes telephone calls, emails, text messages, and bank app usage.
  • Automation: CRMs automate tasks like data entry or marketing outreach. Marketing emails can be quickly generated from preexisting templates, detailing interest rates and data from the CRM.
  • Flexibility: Modern CRMs tend to be cloud-based, are accessible across devices, and are mobile-friendly. These aren’t clunky intranets that only work on a few approved desktops. Even smaller financial firms with a more remote workforce can adopt them.
  • Analytics: You can segment customers, track performance metrics, and analyze data. You can target specific businesses or individuals based on their previous buying behavior.
  • Customer Data: CRMs store, create, and help you analyze the customer information at your disposal. You can better understand your customers when you see the products they like, the type of account they have, and the services they qualify for — like a first-time homeowner loan or veteran services.

Why Do I Need a CRM for Financial Services?

Banking and other financial services are becoming increasingly digital. In 2021, 67% of U.S. customers used their bank’s mobile app, and 41% of customers were labeled as “digital-only”.

These clients aren’t only using your app. They visit your website, email customer representatives, and even interact with your brand on social media. All these interactions contribute to their customer satisfaction.

The financial services industry is shifting from a controlled experience to an environment where customers can navigate their way with less help. This power is great for individuals, but it makes customer retention more important than ever.

You need to track your clients and communicate with them to stay connected. A CRM can help by providing features like automation, segmented marketing, and analytics.

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How Can a CRM Help Your Business?

A CRM for financial services improves communication both internally and externally. Whether you want to focus on improving your marketing, sales, or customer service, a finance CRM has a feature for you.

Spend Less Time Entering Data

Automation is one of the biggest reasons to invest in a CRM. Syncing your CRM with your Gmail or one of the hundreds of other apps lets you keep everything up to date in real-time.

Everyone in your organization benefits from storing the information in one secure database. Suppose customers tend to find your business on social media. In that case, you can chat with them through a messenger app, but the information can still sync with your CRM.

You can do the same with emails. And if the customers reach you by phone, you can record calls and ensure all the information your team needs is in respective customers’ files. This reduces back-and-forth communication and improves your workflow.

When it comes to outreach, you can use email templates. You can create a few options for your sales team to choose from and automatically incorporate data in the emails from your CRM for financial services.

Help Your Teams Work Smarter

Grand View Research shares that 91% of companies with 10 employees or more use a CRM solution. These companies are helping their employees become more productive and freeing up time for more outreach.

With a mobile-ready solution, your financial advisors can access client information everywhere. They can visit clients and bring their accounts with them.

The best CRMs integrate with the other tools like Outlook and Salesforce, saving your workforce time and removing human error from copying the material again.

A CRM for financial services provides your sales and marketing staff with accurate data. They know when a specific customer revisits your pricing page or clicks on a marketing email.

This helps them approach customers when they are most likely to convert.

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How Can a CRM Help Your Customers?

Less Hassle for Service Calls

Customers hate calling their service provider and repeating their issue to multiple people. This frustrates them and forces them to stop using a service.

PwC’s global survey found that 32% of respondents would leave a brand they love after one bad customer service experience. And 43% of consumers said they’d pay more for good service.

Instead of passing customers’ calls between multiple reps and having them reexplain their experience, you can store their interactions in your CRM system. Your customer support team should know what the customers purchased, which websites they visited, and who they interacted with.

Knowledge Is Power

Salesforce shares that 85% of sales staff with data on customers’ propensity claim this data helps them make better sales pitches to customers. 

When your representatives have all the information about a client, they can help a client across multiple platforms. They can upsell a customer and provide a premium customer experience.

Customer Support

A CRM for financial services offers several customer support tools. 

You can empower customers by using CRM tools — like a knowledge base. They can access information at any time and find answers to their questions.

Or they can benefit from chatbots and live chats to get their issue resolved around the clock. 

 

The Features You Need From a CRM for Financial Services

Financial organizations have their unique requirements and often rely on frequent communication with their clients. 

Having the features that enable clearer, faster interactions is a top priority.

Besides that, a CRM for financial services should focus on meeting the needs of both the business and clients, with extra attention to security and building client relationships. 

Scheduling/Reminders

  • Automatic scheduling — Never forget another quarterly call. Automatically schedule follow-ups at specific times — like tax season or after earnings reports.
  • Event-based scheduling — Scheduling based on customer actions, like a call the day after they revisit the product page of your website.
  • Reminders integrations — Reminders that sync with your preferred calendar or email app, so even if you aren’t in your CRM ecosystem, you don’t miss an important meeting.

Email Marketing

  • Customizable email marketing — You can benefit from a drag and drop editor to articulate your message with your branding without coding experience.
  • List segmentation — Divide your customers into lists to target different audiences for different products. This saves hours of manual work. You want to send mortgage rates instead of investment information to clients interested in real estate.
  • Email Analytics — Analytics and A/B testing to track campaign performance and click-through rates (CTRs). See which campaigns your customers respond to and which of your tactics convert.

Sales Management Platform 

  • Real-time reports — Access to various reports on individual sales performance, deal forecasting, sales funnel reports, and more in real-time.
  • Internal communication — Schedule coaching sessions with the whole team or one-on-one. Communicate and collaborate with your customer reps online to connect with them, even if your team has gone remote.

Sales Pipeline Cultivation

  • Defined sales process — Move leads down the customer journey pipeline, from their first website visit to a follow-up phone call timed to convert at best possible time.
  • Centralized tracking — Every customer rep should be able to access all previous interactions with a customer, thus reducing repetition and improving the customer experience.

Automation

  • Data Integration — Automatically update information from different platforms. If you receive a new email address through messenger, you shouldn’t need to type it in across multiple programs.
  • Account-based scheduling — Schedule emails, phone calls, and more at the best time to convert. Your CRM should know which time zone your client is in, when they are active on your website, and when they’ve converted in the past to help you decide the best time to reach out.
  • Event-based automation — Automate processes based on actions, responses, and times. If a client informs you that they are looking to invest for retirement, this should trigger a different campaign than a checking account customer.

Flexibility

  • Integration with existing apps — Your CRM should work with your existing email newsletter builder, social media accounts, and website builder.

    Your CRM should get along with your existing system and not force a complete overhaul. Choose a CRM for financial services that integrates with other apps.
  • Branding — Your CRM should help you incorporate your branding into customizable emails, landing pages, and more. Use a CRM that makes you appear professional.
  • Portability — Your CRM should be accessible from anywhere. A secure cloud-based system can empower you to share sensitive data whether you are on a desktop or mobile. 

Customer Service Support

  • Help Desk — A ticketing system to let you help customers by order and priority.
  • 24/7 Support — Chatbots and live chat help you automate frequent customer service issues and let smaller businesses offer flexible customer service hours.
  • In-sync with sales and marketing — Every customer-facing person should be on the same page. Customer support should know which products a particular client uses, who they spoke, and what issues they encountered.

Get started with HubSpot for free. We offer both forever-free plans and premium services for businesses with more complex needs. 

Check out our free CRM or schedule a meeting with one of our representatives to learn the perfect solution for your business.

How CRM fits into growth

CRMs make life easier, but seeing their impact on your business is also important. CRMs have significantly affected companies' growth in the past few years, and their popularity continues to rise.

65% of sales organizations use a CRM in 2020, compared to 59% in 2018 (Salesforce, 2020). The reasons they chose to use a CRM vary, but top responses included automating tasks like scheduling meetings, content delivery, and contract generation. 

Many companies have stated they use their CRM software to improve retention. 82% of the respondents in a 2021 survey said "Active customer retention" is one of the most important objectives for their CRM team (Tinyclues, 2021).

The integration is paying off as well. 61% of overperforming leaders report using a CRM to automate at least part of their sales process compared to 46% of underperforming leaders. 

CRM systems like HubSpot CRM solve the many challenges presented by growth. CRMs effectively deal with contact management, company, and sales opportunity information. 

They also help consolidate interactions through different communication channels, including your website, email, phone calls, and social media. 

It’s more critical than ever for marketing and sales teams to function as a cohesive unit, and CRM systems are the perfect solution to help scaling organizations achieve that goal.

CRMs help lead to a better customer experience, communicating more effectively with your organization. 

Perhaps most importantly, modern CRM solutions support the complex workflows of fast-growing sales teams. CRM systems keep your team in sync, facilitate more effective use of time and eliminate many of the mindless tasks that take up time without adding value.

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