The company
Community First Bank is a customer-owned bank based in Sydney, with over 80,000 members across Australia and over $2.4 billion in assets. With a rich history dating back to 1959, the bank originated as the Sydney Water Board Officers Credit Union and has evolved into one of the region's most established customer-owned banks.
Unlike traditional banks, which exist to generate returns for external shareholders, Community First Bank is owned by its members—meaning every customer is also a part-owner. Community First Bank's purpose is to offer its members something different: putting them first in the delivery of products and services to help them achieve their personal financial goals. The bank offers everyday banking services—like transaction and savings accounts, personal and home loans, and credit cards. It also supports financial inclusion by maintaining a physical branch network throughout the Greater Sydney Metropolitan area, Illawarra, Central Coast, and Lake Macquarie regions.
The challenge
To grow in a fast-evolving, competitive, and digitised environment, Community First needed to transform its sales and service systems to help staff overcome the limitations of existing legacy systems, improve their service standards, and facilitate sustainable growth.
Community First Bank also found its sales leaders spending significant amounts of time managing manual, spreadsheet-based pipelines, allocating leads, and re-keying leads from various systems into other systems to prepare staff for customer engagement. Before they could make contact with customers, they also had to manually re-key every single lead they received from various sources into Community First Bank's core banking system—which sometimes caused first-response delays of up to 48 hours.
The solution
Zoho CRM for centralised management
Community First Bank started using Zoho CRM as a comprehensive platform to capture leads and manage lending pipelines end-to-end. By providing a single customer view, Zoho CRM enables staff to respond to customer needs more effectively. To derive better business insights on opportunities, aggregate opportunities from all sales and marketing sources, and establish consistent sales and service workflows, the bank migrated to Zoho CRM.
"We work with a broad network of lenders, partners, and brokers. Zoho CRM allows us to provide common sales funnels, more visibility, and more business awareness over our various distribution channels. No longer do we need to manage our pipelines across several systems, spreadsheets, and email inboxes."
A structured customer response framework
To deliver consistency in customer service, Community First Bank developed customer journeys, using Zoho CRM's blueprints to systematise them for lead management as well as its pipelines for application management. These journeys were strengthened with branded communication templates, checklists, and scripts, all of which assist staff in delivering similar standards across an omni channel distribution network.
"One of the key problem statements for Community First was delivering a consistent customer experience through our Contact Centre and branches so we could better identify our friction points. The first thing we did when we onboarded Zoho CRM was create a blueprint."
Assignment rules and threshold settings
Community First Bank implemented Zoho CRM's assignment rules feature to leverage data fields like "enquiry" and "loan type" to automatically assign leads to the most qualified staff members. Setting thresholds also helped establish limits on the volume of customer engagements for each staff member—an approach that ensures prompt responses to customers while keeping staff engaged with opportunities.
“With assignment rules, a new lead is almost immediately assigned to a particular lending specialist for contact. With threshold rules, if our lenders are at their capacities, we've configured the system to look every 15 minutes to find an appropriate allocation. It wasn't unusual for us to first respond to a customer in two days, but the worst case now is within a couple of business hours. We've saved our sales managers several hours a week each in manual lead allocation management."
Leveraging Integrations and automation tools
By positioning Zoho CRM at the centre of its customer engagement ecosystem, the bank integrated its telephone systems, Microsoft 365 environment, and existing loan origination platform. This streamlined approach reduced the need for staff to juggle multiple systems simultaneously and provided deeper insights into customer journey friction points. The bank overcame the limitations of its legacy systems—and thereby minimised manual workloads—by automating routine tasks (like follow-up emails) and using automated webhooks to initiate system requests. This has enabled staff to concentrate on more complex customer needs and foster more meaningful interactions.
Benjamin Irons, General Manager of Member Experience, notes that as one example, integrating Zoho CRM with the enterprise biometric identification system via APIs has saved lenders approximately 800 hours annually by eliminating the need to manually generate identity verification requests.
"Zoho's integration tools have been pivotal in Community First being able to automate a number of our processes. With the relative ease of Zoho's integration tools, we've been able to internally develop over eight automated processes between Zoho and Microsoft Power Automate. Where our process friction caused us to lose one in four opportunities, it is closer to one in ten now."
Enhancing UX and EX with broader Zoho Products
Community First Bank significantly improved data accuracy and operational efficiency using Zoho Forms and Zoho Flow. By replacing manual and static data entry methods with dynamic forms that adjust based on user input, the bank reduced the time required to collect data and minimised input errors. Through seamless integrations, form submissions now automatically update relevant Zoho CRM records and attach completed form outputs to the appropriate records—eliminating the need for manual intervention and ensuring consistent, real-time data across systems.
"We're significantly more productive now. Zoho's platform allows us to monitor our customer journeys and adjust our system processes to improve customer experience and improve staff productivity. Community First is consistently outperforming its prior year results with the same FTE, and the flexibility of Zoho's process automation tools have been fundamental to this growth.”
Real-time visibility with sales pipeline management
By using features such as customised module views, scheduled reporting, and record signals, staff and sales managers gained immediate insights into the status of each lead or application without having to review records individually in their overall pipeline to determine next steps. These tools focused staff on the records that required more immediate action while reducing instances of missed actions that caused poor customer outcomes.
Organisational performance tracking and reporting
Community First Bank used performance tracking features to monitor customer engagement strategies and overall pipeline health. With tools like customizable dashboards, key performance indicators, and real-time analytics, Community First was able to assess performance and make live forecasts based on the staff's customer engagement activities. By analysing key metrics—like product conversion rates, sales cycle times, enquiry velocities, and pipeline values—Community First Bank was able to identify key success opportunities more accurately and increase its return on investment.
"Before Zoho CRM, we just weren't getting consistent actionable data on how effective our sales and service processes were. Our data was fractured across multiple systems, and forecasting accurate future settlements was cumbersome and inaccurate. We've developed data analytics in Zoho CRM now that provide actionable data across the full lending sales journey from lead to settlement. We're able to assess our advertising ROI, conversion rates, and sales cycle times right down to the individual lender and advertising source, allowing us to more confidently invest in growth opportunities."
Client support and onboarding
A key aspect of this success story is the significant impact of Zoho's support and account management teams. Community First Bank experienced a transformative onboarding process that was tailored to their specific needs, and reported that the personalised training and ongoing guidance they received exceeded their expectations.
Our Account Management team's proactive support enabled Benjamin and his team to use Zoho's tools more optimally and fostered a strong partnership that continues to contribute to their success.
- Industry typeBanking
- Employees50-200 employees
- Type of businessB2C
Looking forward
The bank is not resting on its current deployment. When asked about future challenges in delivering leading customer service outcomes, Mr. Irons emphasised the importance of empowering staff. “We are a people-based business," he says. "Technology needs to enable our team to do what they do best—help customers achieve their financial goals. To achieve this, we need quality, holistic data and continuous feedback from our front-line teams to keep improving the system.”
When asked whether he would recommend Zoho to others in the mutual banking sector, Mr. Irons responded, “We're all trying to solve similar problems with limited budgets and limited resources.” He acknowledged the competitive environment but underscored the importance of solutions that are simple to implement and maintain—especially for smaller, agile institutions. “The short answer is yes,” he concluded.
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