Anyone familiar with Sales Cloud will be familiar with how Leads work, so in this article we will look at how Salesforce Financial Services Cloud takes the concept and extends it by providing additional data fields, new components and a suite of reports and dashboards.
There is always some debate around the use of Leads and Opportunities and it’s generally a case of best fit for your use case/process. In a lot of cases Opportunity is going to be good enough for most needs where you are selling to existing customers, whereas Leads can be used for scenarios on customer acquisition. This however, is by no means a hard and fast rule and the new Referrals functionality adds a new twist to that. It is designed to create quick and easy hand offs from one colleague to another for a particular expressed interest, for example from a member of the counter staff to a Mortgage Advisor.
“Referrals help you discover and capture customer needs so you can work to meet them. A customer expresses a need—for a mortgage, retirement planning, or a new credit card. A referral captures this need so the financial institution doesn’t lose it. Financial Services Cloud tracks it until the financial institution meets the customer’s need.” Trailhead – Learn about Referrals
With leads and referrals come 8 new components for reporting and tracking (and you can also download from free reports and dashboards), as well as 11 new custom fields on the lead object - 3 on the opportunity and 2 on the Account object. So not a small amount of extras from a UI point of view and some useful extensions to the data model – primarily around the traceability of who created the referral in order to provide credit.
Two types of referrer are introduced, internal and external, thus allowing a referral to either be credited to a user (where say a member of the branch staff is creating a referral for a new customer or for a new product – this being internal) but also allowing external referrals to be credited to contact records i.e. where a particular customer is referring business to us. The latter is obviously useful if you are running any kind of referral reward scheme to customers.
Referrals, like all leads, are ultimately designed to convert to an account/contact/opportunity as appropriate, and the referrer details are carried through to the opportunity and the account records. This conversion is all tracked and creates a Referrer score for users/contacts on a scale from 0-100 (a simple calculation based on the number of successful conversions). However, as this only tracks the conversion to opportunity/account and not all the way through to product opening (Financial Account) it may not be a suitable metric for all.
The referrals are extensively tracked through the provided components giving insight to the individual on their own performance, to management and operationally to ensure new referrals are picked up and actioned.
New referral types can be added to the out-of-the-box ones (record types on the Lead object) but require you to use the included custom metadata (ReferralRecordTypeMapping).
The functionality is interesting and may be useful in certain scenarios, particularly in new to the bank customers, but if you already have a customer record then an opportunity may be a better fit particularly as Opportunity Scoring is now included for free for eligible customers in Sales Cloud – and Lead Scoring is not. Further, if you have already used the previous suggestions around linking data in Salesforce Financial Services Cloud, your opportunities will already link through to Financial Accounts giving you end to end traceability on outcome.
If you would like to find out more about how Salesforce Financial Services Cloud can help optimise employee productivity and customer experience, give us a call or email us at salesforce@coforge.com.
