How To Get Staff to Engage Customers and Members and Use CRM Software, Part 1

Recently I (Bob) was coaching two bankers, an EVP Retail and VP Marketing. One of them sent me these two questions:

“How do we get our frontline staff to engage current and prospective customers in conversation, develop conversations so they are meaningful, and deepen existing relationships to increase share of wallet?”

“How do we get our staff to enter notes in customer profiles? We’ve had CRM software in place for two years and it has been a constant struggle to gain employee buy-in. They see it as an extra step and a nuisance and say they don’t have time to enter life events and record conversations.”

Does either question sound familiar? These are two of the most common problems we encounter. The latter is one of the stickiest issues for many CRM vendors. They can train your staff on how to navigate their software but we don’t know of any who create the circumstances where your staff will WANT to use the software.

The Problem — The problem is most banks and credit unions haven’t embraced CRM as a true relationship-building tool. As a result, many are not getting the best ROI on their investment in CRM software. Read on to learn what needs to happen.

Get Your Bank or Credit Union Ready for Relationship Banking and Customer Profiling

First — Management has to decide to become a relationship-building organization. That means you can no longer place a major focus on transactional selling to get short-term business. You need to transition to relationship selling. Relationship selling may generate less short-term business but has the advantage of trust building and generating a lot more organic revenue over the lifetime of your customers’ or members’ accounts.

Transactional selling is so ingrained in most financial institutions that, to insure you make the change, you need to make becoming a relationship-building organization a strategic objective. Your branding, mission, communications and recognition of behaviors that support the brand all need to be aligned so staff knows product-pitching is out and building trust relationships is in.

Want more tips? Request our whitepaper, Best Practices to Increase CRM Buy-In, Adoption and ROI by clicking on Contact Us and entering “CRM Best Practices” in the “Other” box.

Get Your Staff Ready to Deepen Customer Relationships

Second — Staff must see the value they can provide the customer or member by using CRM versus viewing it as just another task. Our experience has shown this only happens once staff sees themselves as relationship managers rather than simply sales people. Many frontline staffers are not excited about selling, but they do get excited about helping the customer or member and building the relationship.

They soon realize that in order to build the customer relationship they need the information they’re being asked to enter in the CRM software. This makes them more inclined to ask the right questions and capture relevant information in the profile.

What You’ll Find In Part II of This Post

In part two we’ll provide you with three comprehensive and specific things you can do to get staff to engage customers and members and for your staff to use customer or member profiles in your CRM profiles effectively and increase your ROI. If you are a current subscriber, we’ll send it to you automatically at the end of the month. If this post was forwarded to you, go to High Definition Banking® Blog next on March 30. While you are at it, we invite you to subscribe.

Thanks for reading this month’s post, we welcome your comments below!
Barb and Bob

We are interested in your feedback! In the comments section below, please tell us whether you agree or disagree with the ideas in this post. Also, what challenges or questions do you have that we can answer in this post?

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