Financial institutions have complex portfolios of products presented to customers in a siloed, product-centric fashion, which makes shopping for financial products inefficient and reduces the overall customer experience. However, digital delivery promises to improve customers' shopping experience, CX, and CSAT. 

Some firms in other industries have been doing this successfully, such as Disney for its theme parks. Each theme park has a complex set of offerings to choose from, and Disney uses its MagicBand to connect consumers to all their choices within the park and deliver the final experience. However, developing a customer-centric, unified shopping experience for financial services remains an industry challenge. In the early 2000s, Citibank tried to address these issues with its “Financial Supermarket” concept, But by 2008, the Citibank experiment famously failed. 

Capgemini’s client-centricity framework

Capgemini and Salesforce are working together to enable enterprises to deliver customer-centric, unified, and optimized consumer experiences for financial services, similar to the Disney MagicBand concept. Capgemini has built a client-centricity framework to identify customer drivers and enterprise enablers that will support reengineered customer engagement, and in turn, drive revenue growth and improve customer satisfaction. Critical components of Capgemini’s client-centricity framework include:

• Customer drivers:
  • Personalization: tailoring the customer’s experience 
  • Availability: ubiquitous, 24/7 access and responsiveness to customer inquiries/demands  
  • Trust: built via reputation, ethics, and actions
  • Diverse offerings: providing a wide range of financial offerings  
  • Autonomy: empowering customers to make informed decisions  
• Enterprise enablers:
  • Strategy Alignment: ensuring corporate strategy aligns with customer needs  
  • Data capabilities: employing data to customize offerings to individual customers
  • AI/technology upgrade: re-engineering the technology platform to a customer-centric approach   
  • Operating model automation: digitalizing and automating all operations delivery to customers  
  • Culture: attracting, training, and retaining employees with high domain knowledge and customer interaction skills. 

Effective organizations can analyze customer drivers in real-time and prioritize offerings and fulfillment to meet a customer’s needs.  

Salesforce technology

Salesforce provides the solutions and platforms to integrate and deliver enablement for clients. Key Salesforce offerings used in the partnership include:

• Data Cloud: the platform integrates sales, service, and marketing data from multiple silos to create a single experience across customer-facing functions
• Sales Cloud: a sales management solution providing lead and pipeline management, forecasting, and AI insights
• Service Cloud: a customer services platform that helps businesses manage and resolve customer inquiries and issues
• Marketing Cloud: the platform integrates data, teams, technology, and AI to enable real-time personalization
• Experience Cloud: enables a business to create branded digital experiences to share information and collaborate   
• Financial Services Cloud: a platform built on the SF Sales and Service Cloud platforms but customized for the financial services industry, including industry compliance requirements and data compliance. Initially designed for the wealth management industry, it supports relationship managers managing customer relationships 
• Einstein 1 and Co-pilot Studio: AI assistants that respond to natural language inquiries
• Next Gen Tableau: automates data analysis, predicts user requirements, and generates actionable insights.

These solutions provide functionality to enhance data quality and integrity, provide contextual suggestions, and customize AI actions to specific customers.

By combining these two offerings, Capgemini’s client-centricity offer and Salesforce’s Sales and Experience Cloud offerings, financial institutions can deliver hyper-personalized customer experiences based on their individual preferences. The AI embedded in these platforms enables advisors and customers to find available financial products that are relevant. Current engagements are delivering these capabilities to banks. Here is a recent example:

Client example: large U.S. bank

Challenge

A leading retail bank could not deliver the seamless customer experience it wanted. Specific challenges included:

• Fragmented customer experience due to the lack of a unified digital solution. Lack of a 360° customer overview resulting in a poor time-to-market for new product launches
• Fragmented operational silos, which created a disjointed customer journey, the slow release of solution enhancements, and reconfiguration challenges
• Manual interventions to communicate data across silos reduced visibility and increased error rates in market and transaction data. 

Scope of Services

• Integrated and deployed an integrated solution of Salesforce, Mulesoft, and Marketing Cloud across all systems
• Solution was delivered across experience strategy, roadmap development, design, implementation, and standup
• Phased deployment strategy to minimize risk
• New activation channels were opened based on predefined segmentation to enhance customer engagement.  

Benefits

• Customers experienced an omnichannel experience with priorities based on customer goals, regardless of initial channel entrance
• Improved lead management, resulting in increased conversion ratios
• Minimal impact on legacy systems
• Elimination of manual processes leading to lower error rates, faster throughput, and enhanced CSAT
• Integration benefits included real-time reporting to speed up troubleshooting, provide insights into customer behavior, and assess system performance.

As this case demonstrates, customers no longer have to “stumble upon” products that meet their needs by accessing multiple product silos; the platform can sift through an ocean of data to narrow down offerings and present a few highly relevant suggestions for final consideration. This should make dealing with a bank less stressful and more satisfying.