CRM: why banks and telecom operators are rethinking the customer relationship.

The symptom is easy to recognise. A customer calls the call centre about a complaint already filed at the branch. The adviser cannot see it. They open a new case. The next day, the customer receives a sales offer by SMS, for a product that is precisely the subject of their complaint. Nobody did their job badly. Each team acted on the information available to it. The problem is that this information lives in four systems that do not talk to each other: the core banking or billing system, the call centre tool, the mobile app, and the branch’s spreadsheets.

Why now

Banks and operators in the sub-region built their growth on the physical network and on mobile. Mobile payment brought millions of people into the banking relationship who had never walked through the door of a branch. Operators became financial service providers. Banks responded with their own apps. The result: customer bases that overlap, journeys that cross, and competition that plays out on experience more than on product. In this context, the company that recognises its customer on every channel holds an advantage that pricing alone cannot offset.

Omnichannel: what the word really covers

Omnichannel does not mean opening one more channel. It means making it possible for a customer to start a process on one channel and continue it on another without repeating themselves. That assumes three things, and none of them is a tool.

• A single customer view. One identifier, one file, one history: contacts, complaints, contracts, billing incidents, marketing interactions, brought together and readable in seconds by the person taking care of the customer. That is the building block Salesforce knows how to build; it is also the one that demands the most work on existing data, because the same customer often exists three times, with three spellings.
• Journeys designed end to end. Account opening, subscription to an offer, complaint, cancellation, collections: each journey must be described once, with its steps, its rules and its control points, then served on every channel. The branch, the call centre and the app execute the same journey, with different interfaces.
• An organisation that agrees to share the customer. As long as the branch “owns” its customers, the call centre is judged on call duration and marketing sends its campaigns without looking at open complaints, the CRM will be bypassed. It takes shared objectives, and someone accountable for the complete experience.

The customer does not see your departments. They see one company, and they expect it to remember them.

WhatsApp and mobile, channels in their own right

In the sub-region, WhatsApp is not a secondary channel. For many customers, it is the first reflex for reaching a company, and the mobile app is the first point of access to the service. A CRM that treats these channels as annexes misses the essential. Concretely: WhatsApp conversations must enter the customer file on the same footing as a call, be routed to an adviser or an assistant depending on the request, and leave a usable trace. Salesforce Service Cloud can do it; the organisation still has to accept that a conversation started on WhatsApp commits the company as much as a letter.

The CRM does not live alone: integration with SAP

The customer view has value only if it is accurate. And the data that makes it accurate lives in the core business system: the balance, the invoice, the contract, the outstanding amount, the payment history. A CRM that cannot see them produces fine records and bad promises. Integration between Salesforce and SAP is therefore a workstream in its own right, not a footnote. We build it on MuleSoft: documented, reusable, supervised interfaces, rather than a collection of point-to-point connectors that nobody knows how to maintain two years later. The rule is simple: every piece of data has a master system, the CRM and the ERP read each other, and neither re-keys what the other already knows.

Personal data: the CDP from the scoping phase

A bank or operator CRM is, by construction, a large-scale processing of personal data. It falls under Law No. 2008-12 and the Commission de protection des données personnelles. Declared purposes, customer information, retention periods, right of access and rectification, access security, prior formalities: all of this is designed into the project, not after go-live. Scoring, segmentation and automated campaigns require particular attention: a marketing rule that works in Europe is not necessarily declarable as is in Dakar. A group present in several UEMOA countries handles the question country by country, each State having its own framework.

Adoption, or the real risk of the project

CRM projects rarely fail for technical reasons. They fail when advisers keep working in the old tool, when branches keep their files on the side, when the call centre does not record call reasons because it takes ten seconds too long. Adoption is prepared: screens designed with the teams who will use them, data entry reduced to what really serves a purpose, training that starts from real situations, and managers who use the CRM themselves to steer. A CRM that sales management does not look at is a CRM that nobody fills in.

Measuring what matters

Finally, a customer relationship program is judged on measures set before the project, in business terms: first-contact resolution rate, complaint handling time, share of requests served without going through the branch, churn rate, satisfaction measured after interaction. Not on the number of licences activated. These indicators come out of the CRM itself, provided the journeys are actually executed in it. That is the final test of omnichannel: if the measurement requires a spreadsheet, the journey is not in the system.

Our Salesforce · CRM & customer experience offering and our customer experience expertise start from there. For the challenges specific to each sector: banking & insurance and telecoms & digital services.