Almost all financial services (FS) have some form of social media presence. However, majority of them are not making the most of it, and focused on generic marketing content through their channels or responding to tagged customer communications – usually unsolved queries through traditional customer service channels.
Strategic use of social media can provide valuable insights about your audience – not just the customers. It has the potential to impact audience’s view of your products and services, reputation as a brand, marketing of products and services, risk management, competitive analysis and educate people about financial matters
Why Financial Services firms need to Social?
1. A significantly high percentage, if not all customers and prospects are already on one social media platform or the other
2. There are conversations about your brand – regardless of whether you are present (and active) on social media or not
3. Social Media provides you the opportunity to have a conversation with your customers and prospects – one to one
4. If done right, social media can reinforce your brand persona
5. Provides customers with a 24*7 access to your services – helping build the trust that you are always there to listen to them
6. Allows you to monitor competitor activities
Social media is all about conversations, and with the increasing penetration and trust on digital, more and more customers (and prospects) feel comfortable interacting with the brands on Social. But before you embark on your social media journey, you need to understand the beast that social media is. It is like taming a wild horse, and if not done right, has the potential to harm your brand reputation.
The team at Xtage Labs has worked with multiple financial services institutions – mainly banks, and helped them navigate the tricky waters of social media. We present ways social listening and drawing insights from social contents can help financial services:
1. Keyword and Hashtag based listening: The simplest to implement, keyword and hashtag monitoring enables FSs to know what is being talked about. With some deeper implementation of sentiment and polarity monitoring, along with summary reports, social listening allows you to know what is happening
2. Marketing: All social platforms allow targeted promotions. Digital as a marketing channel is getting more budget allocated in every planning cycle. Marketing on social platforms is different, as it can provide several targeted promotion options – by age, gender, geography, interests etc. With these information, you can offer specific products and services to specific segment of customers, and can reach them through a language that resonates with your audience.
3. Customer Service: There is a reason customers prefer raising complaints on social media – they do not have to wait in a queue or find the right executive to handle their issue. They trust their brand to hear them, and do everything possible at their end to solve their problems. And when brands resolve their customer complaint on a platform, say Twitter, you have the opportunity not only to improve satisfaction level of a single customer – but also to show the customers in the complainant’s network how quick, efficient and customer centric you are. Customer servicing through social media isn’t a risk, but an opportunity to improve customer satisfaction and brand equity. But for this to happen, you need to invest in text analytics driven complaint allocation and automated monitoring of resolution rates
4. Conversation Clustering: Or topic modeling as some may call it, allows financial services firms to identify the multiple themes of conversations happening at a given time. Identifying these themes, and then engaging with your audience with the right content will allow you to converse with the audience and foster a meaningful relationship with them. It also provides insights on your customers from multiple products and services, and those of your competitors
5. Risk Monitoring: Social media is a double edged sword. If you are not on top of the social game, it may backfire and do more harm than good. It is therefore important to have a robust social risk monitoring mechanism before you delve into the world of social media. And social risk monitoring starts with listening, and being able to parse the un-ending stream of social posts to generate insights and handle risks efficiently
Social media, if used correctly, is one of the best channels to grow influence organically and connect with people in novel, personalized manner. It has the potential to multiply your brand reputations and improve customer experience. People are on social platforms to interact with their friends, relatives and share content of personal interest – and if they allow you to interact with them means they are allowing you a peek into their personal space. It is upto you as a brand to maximize the opportunity being presented to you everyday - to be viewed beyond yet another business just focused on deriving profit out of them
Xtage Labs is an advanced analytics and machine learning based decision insights company. We work with businesses to derive insights from data, and improve the decision making processes.
Get in touch with us to find out what we can do for you.
