DEPLOYMENT CHECKLIST
Salesforce
for Banks
DEPLOYMENT CHECKLIST
INTRODUCTION
The idea of an enterprise-wide deployment of Salesforce for a retail or commercial bank can be a daunting task. When you think about all of the sales and customer care agents the implementation will impact, it’s not hard to see why. While there’s no denying that this type of implementation is a significant undertaking, the appropriate planning
can make the process measurably smoother.
Whether your bank is implementing Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Community Cloud or a custom architecture, there are key processes you should work out ahead of time in order to simplify the implementation.
This document will outline the core processes and functions involved in a typical implementation at a high level as well as some of the architectural aspects and useful guiding principles to keep in mind. Ultimately,
this information should inspire ideas and concepts for either a new implementation or enhancements to an existing installation.
CONTENTS
2 Introduction 3 Sales Cloud 4 Service Cloud 5 Community Cloud 6 Custom Architecture 7 ConclusionDEPLOYMENT CHECKLIST
SALES CLOUD
Whether it’s a financial manager, a loan officer or even a bank teller who is encouraged to recommend basic products to customers, many people within the banking environment have sales responsibilities to some extent. Some of the core functions within the realm of sales processes for banks include lead and referral management, customer and contact management and product and opportunity management.
Lead and Referral Management
Lead and referral management is one of the most critical business processes for retail banks. Most large banks will have hundreds of physical branch locations run by thousands of employees and visited by thousands of customers each day. All of these employees and customers have relationships with other individuals in the community. By tapping into these relationships, your bank can bring in a steady stream of incoming leads and referrals simply by word of mouth. Using Salesforce, your bank can encourage these employees and customers to “refer a friend” by adding a lead referral form to your website or corporate intranet. You can then funnel these referrals through the typical marketing approval and qualification process as well as the sales opportunity process.
Customer and Contact Management
Proper customer and contact management can help create a true 360-degree view of all customer activities, financial accounts, transactions, relationships, corporate
hierarchy (in the case of commercial banking) and more in
one easy to view and access location.
With this type of 360-degree view in place, tellers can pull up John Smith’s overview in Salesforce in order to see all recent transactions and account information, such as the fact that he owns a checking account and auto loan with the bank, that he has had a recent overdraft fee and that
he has submitted complaints or inquiries to the customer care organization. Tellers can then use this information to provide a much better and more targeted customer experience during any interactions.
Opportunity and Product Management
Opportunity and product management can help your bank manage its entire set of financial product offerings in a hierarchical format (example below) and track short term and long term sales opportunities with both prospects and existing customers.
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Opportunity management in Salesforce allows for internalsales teams to collaborate on deals and track commissions and revenue splits, all associated products, the probability of closure and critical dates related to deals. This process incorporates the application process for accounts (e.g. the data required to open a checking account or mortgage loan) and all of the due diligence, data collection, compliance/ AML/KYC and onboarding of new accounts. This entire workflow and approval process can be implemented within Salesforce with out of the box workflows and page layouts. Additionally, with Salesforce’s easy-to-use reporting functions, you can make it simple for users to report on this data. For example, you can empower managers to report on leads generated, pipelines by product/rep/date/ territory/branch, active customer relationships, financial accounts owned and more.
SERVICE CLOUD
Beyond sales enablement, customer service is often another major component of Salesforce implementations for banks. This implementation focuses on Service Cloud and the customer care department, which typically consists of a contact center that handles inquiries and complaints from multiple brands and branches that come in via a variety of different channels, including phone, email, web, social and more.
A typical Service Cloud implementation includes business processes for case management, knowledge/solution management and various account maintenance functions.
Case Management
Case management provides the ability to track customer communication history from beginning to end as well as resolutions and escalations of customer inquiries, requests and complaints. Think of a case as a mini project managed by customer care agents.
Using predefined functionality in Salesforce, you can set up case sourcing in a variety of ways. Sources can include:
•
Web requests with Web2Case functionality: Automatically routes cases to support reps based on various assignment criteria, such as product line, territory, branch, etc.•
Emails into a generic support location (e.g. support@ mybank.com) with Email2Case functionality: Allows support agents to manage all email communications directly from the case.•
Telephone with CTI Telephony integration: Provides critical functionality such as inbound/outbound calling, screen pop to customer records, activity logging, standard telephony routing and transfers.•
Live chat capability on an external website with Live Agent functionality: Provides skill-based routing, knowledge article recommendations, supervisor monitoring, quick text and more.•
Mobile video chat with Salesforce SOS: Allows customers using a mobile app to request to video chat with an agent to engage on a more personal level.•
Manually entry via direct communication with the customer.Service Cloud also includes the ability to track case response and resolution times against agreed upon Support Level Agreements (SLAs) to easily determine what needs to be escalated and if you’re falling behind on any critical metrics.
Knowledge Management
Knowledge Management provides the ability to showcase
DEPLOYMENT CHECKLIST
appropriate questions to ask and solutions torecommend to customers. You can then set Salesforce to auto-suggest this article to agents as they create cases related to overdraft fees. This functionality should help agents communicate with customers better and answer their questions more efficiently.
Account Maintenance
Account maintenance is arguably one of the most useful aspects of Service Cloud for banks. Examples of account maintenance functions include:
•
Balance inquiries•
One-time and recurring funds transfers between accounts•
Account payments•
Bill pay setup•
Fraud reporting•
Stop payments•
Address updates•
New card enrollment•
Any other standard banking functions.Generally, these critical functions are performed in other enterprise financial systems, such as FIS, and users need to work on separate screens with different user experiences to manage this data. With Salesforce, you can use custom Visualforce screens or out of the box page layouts to create these maintenance functions, have them interact with other financial systems and transfer the data back and forth as needed. It’s worthwhile to analyze the most requested functions and follow the 80/20 rule to determine what to implement directly in the CRM and what to leave in existing systems. No one wants to rebuild a system like FIS entirely in Salesforce, but replacing certain functions can be very useful in helping support agents solve customer issues quickly.
COMMUNITY CLOUD
Empowering sales reps and customer care agents to provide stellar service to customers and prospects is great, but what if you could also empower customers to answer many of their questions and perform account maintenance on their own? With Salesforce Community
Cloud, you can enhance the customer experience by
providing external web access to prospective clients and existing customers directly from your website.
While it’s a given that your bank will have a customer-facing website, what’s not as common is integrating your website with your CRM system. However, you can make this a reality with Community Cloud. Your bank can create communities for a number of purposes, for example to expose bank rates information to show prospective customers the current CD and savings rates per division, to provide external-facing enrollment forms for checkings/ savings accounts and loans or to provide an easy way for customers to contact a branch manager with questions about specific products.
Plus, you can brand your communities to match corporate design standards and to meet “pixel perfect” UI/UX requirements.
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Some other common community use cases for banks include:•
Deposit/credit account summaries•
Loan application multi-page wizards•
Documentation submission screens•
Rates calculators•
Bill payment•
Rewards and loyalty programs•
Account payments•
Find an ATM/Branch•
Submit a complaint•
Review transactionsThe diagram below provides a high level example of a typical bank’s customer community configuration.
CUSTOM ARCHITECTURE
Architecting a tightly integrated banking CRM solution into all of the various backend systems that might be involved is not a simple tasks. Typically, the best way to do this is to implement the functionality and architecture in stages in order to expose users to key capabilities slowly, giving them time to truly adopt and love the application.
With an overall banking strategy, there are many topics that
need to be addressed, such as Middleware (ESBs vs. ETL), integration patterns (Batch vs Time vs. Near Real-Time), technologies (APIs vs. Flat Files vs. Web Services, etc.) and more. These topics require a much deeper dive and discussion with a Salesforce Technical Architect, but the diagram below provides a high level overview of a reference architecture that focuses on integration with a financial system, such as FIS, single sign on capabilities, telephony integration, encryption capabilities, BI reporting and use of an Enterprise Data Warehouse. This architecture is very common among banks.
In addition to the architectural discussions, mobile access by sales and service users is always a critical requirement to provide secure access to customer data on the go. With Salesforce1 Mobile, this requirement is always satisfied by default.
Example Bank’s customer community sitemap
Example of a reference architecture for a Banking implementation of Salesforce.com
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FIND OUT WHAT CLOUD SHERPAS CAN DO FOR YOU
Our focus is on helping organizations meet all their cloud needs, including running business applications like messaging, collaboration and CRM in the cloud, developing custom cloud solutions using platforms and infrastructure as a service and integrating existing cloud solutions with other clouds and business systems. Let us help you leverage the cloud. Contact your sales representative or visit us online at
www.cloudsherpas.com
CONCLUSION
Understanding and planning for requirements like these ahead of time can help make your bank’s Salesforce implementation a much smoother and more successful experience.
Working with an experienced partner like Cloud Sherpas who has extensive expertise in both the banking industry and the Salesforce ecosystem can help you better grasp these concepts and accelerate your time to market. At Cloud Sherpas, we understand the many complexities that are associated with introducing new technologies
and business processes at banks, and we’ve developed through these challenges.
