At SIBOS earlier this year, sales force automation (SFA) was a recurring issue, as banks are finding themselves under increasing pressure to improve customer service interactions whilst remaining cost efficient.  While discussing these challenges, it became clear that SFA is going to play a much bigger role in the future of banking and how banks address digital disruption challenges to ensure improved productivity and efficiency.

Currently, sales representatives are spending 60% of their time on non-sales activities such as admin work, reporting and research, resulting in poor efficiency and missed sales opportunities. Therefore smarter sales processes need to position SFA tools in the context of all customer-facing services, including onboarding and CRM.

Our recent research on the power of integrating sales force automation tools with treasury onboarding commercial/wholesale banking executives showed that integrating onboarding and servicing with SFA does in fact drive significant efficiencies. According to our survey, roughly 50% of executives asked believe that the most considerable shortcoming of their current SFA tools from other vendors is that they cannot view client data in real time, nor can they initiate inquiries or customer requests from it.

More than one third of all respondents manually re-key data from sales in onboarding tools, with 51% indication that only some information is auto-populated. This results in additional labour expense, slow service and problems with data integrity. What’s more, the survey showed that 78% of executives thought that their organisations would increase sales to existing clients by at least 20% if they had seamless integration between sales force automation, onboarding applications and customer service processes.

As customer onboarding can be time consuming and error-prone due to manually entering client data from different sources, financial organisations need more comprehensive solutions that automatically integrate client relationship data into the onboarding and customer service systems. Specialised technology can play a key role in centralising all data, while intelligently automating business-driven processes to improve sales and performance.

Looking at these results, it seems that financial organisations need to present a regulated and reliable service framework to deliver the right experiences to commercial banking customers; by integrating sales automation, onboarding solutions and an improved customer service system, banks can realise significant sales increases. It’s time for banks to become more customer-centric, delivering efficient, seamless experiences to customers to convert the complex challenges they currently face into competitive advantages.   

There is no point winning your new customer, just for the relationship to fall at the first hurdle of getting them onbaord and ready to do business.