Financial services organizations are racing to modernize the customer or member journey to meet evolving consumer expectations. They are also working to give their relationship managers the technology to compete – and succeed – in a new era of marketing.
Implementing the right technology solutions to power digital transformation is a critical decision that will have a lasting impact on your lifetime profits and growth.
Trusting a CRM alone for sales and marketing leaves you vulnerable to critical gaps that can derail customer or member engagement and relationships. A modern Marketing Operating System (MOS) improves business relationships with a focus on one-to-one engagement that not only streamlines the sales and marketing process but also humanizes it, creating customer or member relationships that last a lifetime.
Before you can enhance the customer journey or member experience to create customers or members for life, you must lay the groundwork for modern marketing success across four crucial steps.
- Step One: Assess Your Digital Maturity
- Step Two: Gather Input from Key Stakeholders
- Step Three: Build a Business Case
- Step Four: Align with Your Executive Team
Below we detail step three in the process:
Step Three: Build a Business Case
As you move forward in altering your tech stack to better support marketing and sales, the next step is outlining the core reasons new technology is needed in the first place, what the outcome will be once you bring in a new solution and how it will make your organization more profitable.
Put yourself in your executives’ shoes and ask, “What’s in it for them? How will the business perform better because of this new technology solution?” You are essentially asking the leaders of the company to take a risk and trust that you’ve selected the right solution. Building a business case will show you’ve done your research and reinforce the idea that a change is needed.
Driving Revenue from Enhancing Your Customer or Member Experience
We can’t stress enough how important the customer or member journey is. That it be fluid, frictionless and establish your brand as a true industry leader.
Providing metrics around how a new technology solution will strengthen your brand and increase customer or member retention will be hard for your company to ignore. According to Gartner, more than 50 percent of organizations are making investments to elevate their customer experience this year.
It’s time to get ahead of the curve – or get left behind. At Total Expert, we’ve seen significant success with our customers migrating from generic drip campaigns to pre-set Journeys that provide humanized engagement throughout the customer or member experience.
To accomplish this – at scale – you must have a technology solution built to support the needs of consumers and empower relationship managers to provide a seamless customer or member experience on all channels.
Cost Savings with Increased Efficiencies
Everyone needs more hours in their day. Using technology solutions to improve business efficiencies – eliminating manual work to let technology handle tedious, day-to-day tasks – can also improve productivity and, as a result, increase growth.
As Total Expert Chief Customer Officer Sue Woodard says, “Technology won’t replace relationship managers, but the relationship manager who leverages technology will replace the one who isn’t.”
Think of technology as a way to enhance relationships rather than take away that personal touch. When you have the right solution in place, technology empowers relationship managers to spend less time completing mundane tasks and more time out in front of prospects and customers or members.
Financial brands are quickly setting themselves apart with best-in-class tech stacks fit to serve the needs of their customers or members while yielding significant efficiency gains. In today’s digital age, having the right technology solution for your organization is far more than a nice-to-have, it’s a need-to-have.
Build a Long-Term Foundation for Marketing and Sales
Some people dread change and avoid it at all costs. But the reality is, change is constant. And we all know that.
A report by EY indicated the financial services industry incurred $196.5 billion in mergers and acquisitions in 2018, a 139 percent increase from 2017, and an influx of deals is expected this year.
What better way to position your business for success than arming yourselves with a solution built to grow as consumer needs change and the industry evolves?
Perhaps some people think your current technology is working. There’s no need to adjust. But will it still be working five years from now? 10 years from now? Will it empower relationship managers to truly contribute to the bottom line? It’s imperative you have a technology solution with open architecture, so you can future-proof your business and keep up with the pace of change.
Take a look at potential gaps in your technology stack and identify them before it’s too late. Be proactive in setting up your business for success and invest in a solution that will pass the test of time.
Conclusion
To compete – and succeed – in the new era of marketing, relationship managers need the technology behind them that allows them to modernize the customer or member journey.
Once you’ve built a business case to enhance your tech stack, you can take the next step – aligning with your executive team – to set your organization up for success and be on your way to creating customers or members for life.
