Connect with Customers in a Whole New Way
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- Explain how Salesforce helps banks identify prospects early in the buying journey.
- Describe how Salesforce enables banks to target prospects with offers focused on their needs.
- Explain what a frictionless customer onboarding experience looks like.
Here we tell a story of digital transformation in banking and how it can create convenient experiences that customers love.
Let’s begin by meeting one of the main characters.
How Banks and Customers Can Find Each Other
Rachel Adams is a professional in her early 30s who recently moved to New York City for a new job. She’s starting another chapter in life and is looking for a bank that can help her achieve her financial goals.
Rachel is doing a lot of research about her banking options. At the office, she browses online for savings and checking account options. On her commute, she uses her phone to read articles on financial websites. At home, she uses her tablet to ask friends for recommendations and advice on social media.
Meanwhile, Cumulus Bank, our fictitious bank in this story, is looking to serve customers just like Rachel. The challenge is, how do they know it is Rachel doing all of this research across different devices, websites, and channels? In the past, Cumulus Bank might have missed these crucial signals about Rachel’s financial needs.
But not today. Cumulus Bank is using Audience Studio to listen for these signals and piece together the digital breadcrumbs that Rachel leaves as she explores her options. Audience Studio captures Rachel’s anonymous data from multiple screens and sources, unifies the data to identify and understand her individual preferences and expectations, and uses the data to target campaigns.
Cumulus places Rachel into one of their highest-priority segments: millennials who are likely to purchase interest-bearing checking accounts. Cumulus is targeting this segment with a special offer that features a sign-up bonus, and they put Rachel on a marketing journey with personalized messaging about this offer that is based on her interests and needs.
Because Rachel hasn’t yet raised her digital hand by contacting Cumulus, the bank can’t send her emails or text messages. But Cumulus can use the Salesforce Marketing Cloud Advertising Studio to serve Rachel relevant ads, featuring the interest-bearing checking account offer, on her favorite websites.
The following GIF illustrates an example of a journey that Cumulus can create using Salesforce Marketing Cloud.
How does this journey look from Rachel’s perspective?
As she continues browsing bank websites and financial blogs, she begins to see ads promoting the Cumulus checking account. These ads are consistent across her devices and channels, and eventually she clicks one to learn more. But before she can initiate the process for opening an account, she gets distracted and abandons the process.
A Frictionless Onboarding Experience
Like many millennials, Rachel spends a lot of time on social media interacting with friends and browsing content. One day, as she scrolls through her feed on her phone, she sees an ad for Cumulus Bank. She’s intrigued, because the ad says that she can message the bank directly to learn more right now, rather than filling out a form and waiting for the bank to respond.
So Rachel taps on the ad, and immediately an intelligent chatbot engages her via a Facebook message to provide the information she’s curious about.
Rachel is impressed with the checking account’s $100 signing bonus and 0.60% interest rate. And she’s thrilled that she can even begin the sign-up process right from her phone. She enters her email address, and a lead record is automatically created in Salesforce. This means the bank can follow up with Rachel if, say, she gets a call from a friend and abandons the sign-up process, because Salesforce now stores her contact information.
Rachel continues with the process, however, and clicks the link from the chatbot. This takes her into the Cumulus onboarding web application—built on Salesforce Community Cloud.
As Rachel begins onboarding, she authenticates into the application using her social media credentials. In the background, Salesforce converts her lead record into contact and account records and syncs the associated data from her social media account (email, profile picture, etc.) to the new records. Salesforce also creates an opportunity that indicates Rachel is interested in a checking account.
Cumulus doesn’t receive all of the necessary personally identifiable information (PII) from social media authentication. So the onboarding app lets Rachel upload a photo of her driver’s license, rather than requiring her to manually type in her information. Thanks to optical character recognition, the information from Rachel’s driver’s license autopopulates most of the fields on the onboarding application. Salesforce syncs this data to Rachel’s contact record. After that, all she has to do is enter her Social Security number and answer a couple of security questions.
Next, Rachel accepts the Cumulus Bank terms and conditions. Now only one step lies between Rachel and her brand-new checking account (and $100 bonus). Rachel needs to verify her identity, proving that she’s the person who she said she is.
Rachel has a couple of options for completing this step. The classic approach involves visiting a personal banker in her local branch. But Rachel looks outside and sees that it’s pouring rain. She’s definitely not going outside in this weather!
Fortunately, she can stay in the comfort of her home, as Cumulus Bank has enabled two-way video chat—powered by Salesforce Service Cloud—in their onboarding app. Rachel can immediately connect with a personal banker and verify her identity remotely.
Matt is a Cumulus personal banker who helps new customers get started with the bank. He loves delighting customers with smart and speedy service. He monitors CSAT (customer satisfaction) and NPS (net promoter score) ratings constantly.
Matt is working in Salesforce when he receives an alert through Service Cloud Omni-Routing. A new customer named Rachel is trying to verify her identity and open a checking account. Matt responds to Rachel’s incoming video call right away. He knows CSAT ratings are much higher among customers who receive help immediately.
Rachel connects with Matt and presents her driver’s license over the video feed. Matt confirms her identity and thanks her for becoming a new Cumulus Bank customer.
Einstein recommends a next step for Matt so he can actively address Rachel’s needs. Matt accepts Einstein’s recommendation and texts a link to Rachel for the Cumulus Bank mobile app, where she can set up and fund her account.
In addition, Salesforce triggers a text message to Rachel, asking her to authorize the new account opening. Rachel replies “Yes,” and Salesforce records that response to help with compliance reporting on customer consent authorization.
Without leaving the comfort of her own home or moving away from her preferred online and mobile channels, Rachel has discovered, researched, and onboarded to Cumulus Bank! This shows how convenient experiences powered by the Salesforce platform let banks connect with their customers in new ways that build loyalty.