Dean Carroll, general manager of Xpedition takes a look at the benefits.
Garter predicts that by 2025, 75% of the world’s highest growth companies will be adopting a Revenue Operations framework, or ‘RevOps’ for short, financial services firms among them. RevOps is the strategic integration of sales, marketing, and customer success to drive more scalable and sustainable growth, deliver value, and supply a more accurate end-to-end view of the revenue pipeline.
In future, successful organisations will be the ones that understand customer experience is a primary driver of growth and make the necessary investments in technology, people, and processes to meet these expectations. By breaking down departmental silos and aligning data, departments, and solutions, RevOps will provide organisations with more accurate intelligence on what is happening across the entire customer journey, so together, they can respond as one commercial team to ensure the experience is personalised and frictionless and personalised.
However, it’s easier said than done; skills, technology, data, people, and strategy all need to be perfectly merged. This article will look at how FS firms are managing the challenge, in particular integrating legacy systems and data, and adopting modern technologies such as business intelligence and AI (Artificial Intelligence), to not just grow but thrive.
The rise and rise of customer experience in financial services – could RevOps unlock a new door?
Gartner has predicted that by 2025, 75% of the world’s highest growth companies, including financial services firms, will be adopting RevOps. A blend of the words ‘revenue and operations,’ RevOps is heralded as a strategic framework to align sales, marketing, and customer service so they work as one commercial, revenue orientated team.
In a RevOps world, the, marketing, sales and customer relations teams work together to identify the market opportunity and the role they should play in attracting leads, moving prospects from enquiry to sale, creating loyal customers and reducing customer churn.
These teams no longer work in isolation or act on data that is exclusive to their function. When RevOps is employed, everyone is pulling in the same direction. The same data sets and information dashboards are used. People are aligned to the same metrics, and everyone is responsible for customer success.
Why now?
There’s growing evidence to suggest that people will pay more for a product or service, and even perceive it to be good value, if they also receive great service. Apple is a renowned example, and with its recent move into financial services, it has capitalised on the trust people place in the brand’s values.
It’s also an indicator of the move towards managing the ‘lifetime value’ of a customer. Companies are more readily asking what constitutes excellent value and creates loyal customers? But also, how can they compete on customer experience as well as price?
A complex, but necessary, undertaking
New market disruptors are answering these questions with digitalisation, exerting even more pressure on incumbents to review their business processes and go digital.
Over the last few years, and accelerated by the pandemic, the move to the cloud, the adoption of business intelligence platforms and digital applications has become the strategic imperative. Modernise through digital transformation or die is the implication.
In our experience, visionary business leaders understand the value that business and digital transformation can deliver– from faster, streamlined, and personalised online experiences for customers, through improved speed to market for new products and services, to higher quality data from which to make decisions.
However, it’s not a simple undertaking. Transformation projects can be complex, especially when legacy systems and multiple datasets are involved. It takes bold leadership to break the status quo.
Plus, technology is only a part of the digital transformation story. Culture too can be an inhibitor to success if not aligned to a clear business vision. It takes skill to successfully bring everyone onboard a shared change journey.
To get buy-in, companies must consult stakeholders about their concerns, as well as understand the technology and processes needed to achieve strategic goals.
Where revenue hasn’t grown as quickly as expected or leads weren’t converted at the predicted rate, the root cause isn’t always the technology or employee expertise; it’s the way the company is organised. If teams fall back into the old ways of working and revert to working in silos, there can be significant impact on customer experience.
The need for virtual teams
However, as companies that implement a RevOps framework can testify, when you change how people collaborate across the firm, the investment in digital transformation is realised more quickly.
In effect, creating virtual commercial teams bring together different skill sets from marketing, sales, customer success, so that their respective goals and strategies are interconnected. Clearly defining steps and stages will ensure and seamless interactions between teams internally and a positive experience for the customer. Since customers only care about the experience, they don’t care which team or department they are dealing with. If customers aren’t thinking in silos, your organisation shouldn’t be either.
It also gives everyone full oversight of what is happening, why and when and, most importantly, the autonomy to make a change quickly so sales aren’t lost. What’s more, once a sale has been made, a dedicated and personalised plan to nurture customers can be activated based on business intelligence gathered during the sales process. This might lead to programmes that encourage further loyalty and the cross-selling of new products.
Crucially, customer experience can be enhanced when the team are able to access key insights. If everyone in the commercial team has access to the same customer relationship management (CRM) system that provides a single source of the truth, they can act on insights together, connecting the various dots across the entire customer experience.
By adopting RevOps, firms gain a strategic advantage. With the right blend of technology and a clear transformation vision, it’s possible and to exceed customer expectations, and compete and win in this competitive market.
