Salesforce expands offerings for financial service providers

Salesforce – a tech company providing customer relationship management (CRM) solutions to help businesses' marketing, sales, commerce, service, and IT teams – has expanded its financial services offering for insurance, banking, and wealth management companies.

The new offering, “Salesforce for Financial Services,” provides more targeted and trusted automation and artificial intelligence (AI) provided by CRM platform Client 360 to help teams access insights, deliver excellent customer service, and drive operational efficiencies – whether they deal directly with customers, underwrite loans, or manage administrative duties.

Salesforce launched the new offering after its recent survey of over 2,000 consumers found that more financial services customers now prefer digital rather than face-to-face experience, with 78% of banking customers having established their first connection with a financial institution via a website or app. However, fewer than 15% of the respondents across insurance, banking, and wealth management felt their financial needs were anticipated.

“Financial services institutions are trying to keep pace with the digital acceleration that occurred as a result of the pandemic,” said Eran Agrios, SVP and GM, Financial Services at Salesforce. “At the same time, consumers are demanding more tailored services. New Client 360 capabilities are designed to meet these complex needs head-on, creating more efficiency across internal teams. This gives employees and customers the time and tools they need for a better experience overall.”

Read more: Insurance leaders offer advice on improving insurance technology

The Salesforce for Financial Services includes several features to help businesses improve customer service and boost customer satisfaction:

• CDM helps marketing teams at financial services institutions unify their customer data from different sources into a client profile using clicks rather than code to deliver personalised engagement at scale across every channel, including email, mobile, advertising, and the web.
• The virtual assistant is powered by Service Cloud Einstein bots, with the customer service coordination powered by Slack. It automates routine requests quickly across digital channels, such as text and messenger platforms, to help agents focus on tasks that require human interaction.
• The intelligent agent desktop enables agents to unlock valuable customer insights without leaving the console page. It features customer identity verification to reduce fraud risk as well as customer record alerts to deliver a faster and more comprehensive service.
• Customer service coordination enables service agents to collaborate in Slack as their digital HQ to accelerate customer case resolution.
• Analytics for financial services helps financial services institutions see and understand their customers' data to make better business decisions faster and deliver more predictable revenue and deepen client engagement.