Your data is one of the most critical assets within any company, but especially within the financial sector. It is not only an IT asset, but just as much a sacred pot of gold that a customer has been kind enough to lend to you during her stay with you. Your responsibilities towards your customers and authorities with regards to this data is of utter importance for your whole organization. You will need to store this data in a secured manner, protecting it from any unauthorized access, while at the same time utilizing it to its full potential to drive your business and make time critical decisions in both manual and automated processes.
Make it an advantage
Your sales processes will need as much insight as possible into every existing and new customer to increase the efficiency and possibility of obtaining a customer to cross-sell a new product. You will operate with new incoming and existing data, from multiple sources and obtained in different contexts. To make this into an advantage for your company your overall Data Management processes needs to be top notch.
Areas of improvement
Your service processes will need insight into both current and historical data in order to help your customer in the best possible way, and they need it real-time, imagine the difference between you calling your bank to report an intrusion of your credit card vs. your bank proactively identifying suspicious transactions and taking actions immediately, it all comes down to the data. Self-Service and Call-Deflection are other areas where your company can most likely improve, perhaps the question is not how good are your self-service capabilities, but rather how accessible and usable are they for your customers?
Communicate with customers
Marketing processes is no exception to a need of data, rather the opposite. How you communicate with your customers, at what time and in what channels will only increase in importance as we as consumers move more and more away from our keyboards in favor of mobile, tablet and smart-wear devices. Your ability to provide different customers with different communication at different times and in different channels will most likely be one of the key opportunities for your company to shine over your competitors. These decisions are based on data, that is ever changing across individuals and groups.
Salesforce provides the tools necessary for you to store, protect, process, use and analyze this data throughout the data life cycle. With Salesforce you will be able to take advantage of your data at the right time throughout your business processes, while at the same time adhering to regulations and requirements around visibility of sensitive and classified information. More on this in up-coming chapters...
Data is the fuel
I like to think about data as the fuel that a Salesforce platform runs on, data comes in different qualities, types, and amounts. The fuel needs to go into your engine in an optimized way in order to move you forward in the desirable speed and with confidence. There are a lot to say about Data Quality and what types of data to have On- vs. Off the platform. You will need to work with your data before it is put into Salesforce, while it is on your Platform and afterwards. It all comes down to a conscious and well thought-through Data Strategy, that enables access to date from various functions and applications in a conscious way.
Join the conversation
Please join the conversation and share your thoughts with me.
In the next blog post we will dig deeper into:
- API-first feature enabled platform
