April 2015
Why Are CRM Solutions so Important to Finance & Insurance?
It’s hard to think of an industry that a CRM solution can’t benefit – but there are those industries which reap more advantages than others, and two in particular are the insurance and finance industries. Insurance companies alone could find a million uses for a CRM, and both have found such tools to be proving more and more important to their continued survival in recent years. This week, we took a look at a few reasons why CRMs have such importance in these industries – and what issues CRMs could be resolving for them.
Competitive Market
Finance and insurance have always been competitive industries; every other company is out to make more money and snap up more consumers than their rivals on a scale which makes other industries look tame. In recent years, these industries have become ridiculously competitive thanks to financial crises, consumer mistrust, increasing numbers of available financial products, and a whole raft of public scandals. While some companies are finding short-term remedies for these, such as public apologies, promotional offers and free cuddly toys, smart players in the finance and insurance industries will be taking advantage of a CRM to strengthen their customer service, output and internal procedures in order to clearly outperform competitors in the long-term.
Better Customer Service
It’s not just companies competing with each other: we live in a world where Twitter has become the new battleground for disgruntled customers and public feedback is exactly that - public. As mentioned above, consumers have lost trust in insurance companies and financial institutions, but the other enemy of the consumer is bad customer service, which is often cited as a major loss of retained business. There are a number of reasons why consumers may be turned off by customer service: the process could be too long, their information may not be available, and they could even feel like they’re being needlessly passed around departments.
Countering this, smart companies use detailed CRM solutions with centralised customer data, to empower all members of the team to provide the best customer service possible, allowing customer relationships to blossom into retained business. Good customer service is talked about almost as much as bad experiences on social media – and these industries need this positivity working in their favour.
More Opportunities
In the past, massive investment opportunities have been scouted out by finance and insurance companies, and in order to replicate that, employees are willing to scour through tonnes of data. Little do they know that a CRM with powerful, real-time reporting tool would allow them to analyse historic and current trends to pinpoint fantastic new opportunities for revenue, investment and growth. The quantitative nature of financial data makes this a no-brainer.
Security
Finally, with the sort of data kept by companies in the finance and insurance industries, there’s a risk from outside theft. The best way to keep some information safe – and keep customer loyalty at an all-time high – is to keep it in a safe system, secured with up-to-date software and 99.9% uptime.
Of course, ‘bespoke is best’ – and particularly smart companies will be using a tool suited to their own needs in order to really benefit themselves and their customers. Were you surprised by the importance of CRMs to these industries? Tweet us with your thoughts!
Interested in how a bespoke CRM can take your customer service out of this world? Get in touch for a free Lunar CRM demo and find out for yourself!