In banking, expectations of what defines the optimal customer relationship is becoming a moving target. In an industry where previously a strong rate and handshake sufficed, now even seamless digital experiences are more table stakes for customers and members.
According to recent reports involving banking consumers by CRM provider Salesforce, 46% of consumers — including 55% of high earners — would stay with a financial service institution that provides an excellent customer experience, even if they raised rates or fees. And Zendesk found that a whopping 73% of financial services customers say they’ll switch companies after one lousy service experience.
The fact that CRM providers have surveyed banking customers isn’t just out of academic interest: many of the efficiency benefits these platforms offer are applicable in the banking space, including providing a single source of truth to connect business silos; offering time and costs savings for rank-and-file employees to better address strategy and revenue generation; and increasing customer lifetime value and support through better access to data.
In fact, many financial institutions have already implemented CRMs to aid in their customer acquisitions, finding analogous processes within traditional “sales” and “upsell” motions for industry-specific initiatives like deposit acquisition and product expansion.
However, as the bar for customer experience in banking rises, more financial institutions are skipping the middleman and adopting a dedicated platform that benefits customers and staff. An Accenture report cited by Zendesk itself has found that “over 50% of customers are interested in ‘need-based, integrated product and service offerings,’” regardless of whether or not they qualify as a CRM [2].
The shift to a “CRM mindset” is paramount in any industry looking to keep up with the digitization of customer acquisition and experience. But what’s becoming clear are the risks of painting with too wide a brush: staff efficiency, customer satisfaction, and personalization in banking aren’t achieved from applying industry-agnostic sales motions – they’re built through a nuanced understanding of consumer and business banking.
It’s the reason why one of our largest forward-looking strategic investments is in our Narmi Command admin platform: we believe that all of the reasons why a retail business would want a CRM are the same reasons why a financial institution would want a dedicated, industry-specific back-office solution that connects seamlessly to your account opening experience, digital banking software, and fraud stack.
In the last few years, we’ve begun to see the beginnings of a “trust conundrum” in banking: while 61% of customers report that their bank acts as a trusted advisor, only 21% of banking consumers are fully satisfied with their capabilities for personalization, and a small percentage of banking customers are satisfied with their financial institution’s customer service in terms of speed (27%) and effectiveness (26%) [1].
The break is felt on the other side of the interaction:
With over half of Gen X, Millennial, and Gen Z banking customers preferring to engage with their financial institutions “mostly digitally,” these owned channels represent the most obvious area of improvement for FIs looking to enhance their customer experiences [1].
“Financial institutions looking to capture younger generations, or hoping to have them inherit accounts, have to start investing in digital experiences today,” said Ayesha Imran, Senior Product Manager at Narmi. “That means thinking through what platforms provide them with the greatest amount of digital touchpoints like web and mobile apps, and which platforms are bent towards leveraging new technologies like automations and AI to increase servicing speed and efficiency.”
The ideal back-office platform for financial institutions should be capable of honing industry-specific efficiencies while remaining customizable and proactive to changing tides in the banking environment.
For example, in no small part due to the proliferation of consumer apps that retain login credentials across experiences, users have come to expect that they should only have to input information once to maintain consistency: 69% of consumers expect all representatives to have the same information about them. But 47% of consumers say they often have to repeat or re-explain information to different representatives, and only 27% say they are fully satisfied with their ability to get an answer to their questions from a bank [1].
The right industry-specific platform sits between direct integrations of user-facing banking solutions and the core, allowing for a full customer profile view before – and during – every interaction with your community. This enables a highly personal view of customer/member behavior at the individual level, through metrics like transaction information, debit card usage, and granular customer action logs. Adopting these standards allow for easier dispute resolution, and excavates additional rich data for personalization.
“Both of Command’s upcoming messages and customer profile redesigns demonstrate the power of Narmi One -- the more of your digital suites you have on one platform, the more information and customer insights we're able to aggregate and surface,” said Imran. “These insights are then directly able to impact your ability to service end customers efficiently and effectively.”
PwC’s 2024 Global Workforce Study put it best: “Workers and CEOs are on the same page when it comes to red tape, wasted time and organizational friction at work. Both feel about 40% of the time they spend on administrative activities is being spent inefficiently.”
The trend holds in banking, perhaps especially so: a recent Cornerstone Advisors report of executives in the industry named “efficiency, noninterest expenses, and costs” as one of their most pressing concerns in 2025, both for banks (51%) and credit unions (59%).
In addition to in-house corrective measures, banking industry players are looking to technology partnerships to address their efficiency gaps, through solutions that connect staff and allow them to shift resources to more revenue-generating and strategic tasks. 28% of banks and 35% of credit unions named “reduc[ing] operational expenses” as one of their most important objectives for fintech partnerships [3]. Paired with the fact that talent management is a top priority for community banks, it’s clear financial institutions see technology commitments as simultaneous drivers of efficiency and employee empowerment.
“Community banks and credit unions around the country are facing staffing shortages, and are struggling to remain focused on key strategic priorities amid increases in threats like cybersecurity and fraud,” said Sveva Rosati, Product Marketing Manager at Narmi.
The International Branch Banking Employee Survey illuminates how rank-and-file banking professionals see their ideal solution: nearly 80% say they want modern tools that integrate seamlessly into workflows, enabling them to get in front of customers and attend to their rising expectations.
Modern, industry-focused tools like Narmi Command allow bank and credit union staff to optimize (and even automate) tasks like data entry and compliance reporting by consolidating customer data and providing maximum visibility/accountability. These back-office streamlining capabilities – which can take the form of real-time issue resolution and identity decisioning; comprehensive dashboards showcasing long-term trends and granular permissions; and advanced business intelligence capabilities, among others – open up possibilities for increased customer satisfaction and cross-selling opportunities.
“As we continue to build Narmi Command, we plan to place more of an emphasis on building automations and rules engines into staff workflows,” said Imran. “This will not only allow us to continue to drive efficiency and ensure financial institutions are able to scale their operations responsibly, but it also gives them control over how they want automations to work, and design them to best suit their workflows and processes.”
Banking is no stranger to the shift towards digitized, decentralized business processes. The need for a centralized back-office platform – a “command center” – that is not only powerful, but specialized, will only become more apparent. It’s why we feel that Command is the connective tissue between all of the solutions of our Narmi One platform, and the one that most exemplifies our integration ethos.
