Social Listening has measured the social media voice of your consumers and can have a huge impact on a bank’s reputation. Responding to your customers’ issues in real time can easily turn a bad situation into a winning customer experience.
Unfortunately, many banks are still hesitant to develop a strong social media presence on account of the heavy industry regulations. But, with the right education and social listening platform, banks can compliantly tap into all the benefits and rewards social media has to offer.
Here are five ways banks are effectively leveraging social listening to become compliantly and actively social – while tracking and managing their reputation.
Understanding the Landscape
Social listening will provide you with a full grasp on who your community is, and where they “live” – this information will be key when you’re ready to engage.
Do your customers and prospects engage on twitter, blogs, forums or mainstream news? What keywords do they use the most? Maybe they’re discussing “banks”, “credit cards”, “investments”, “equities” or “brokers”.. or something else? Social listening will uncover these conversations and help you to get to know your community. And depending on the global reach of your company, it may be important to consider investing in a tool that provides vast global coverage and language capabilities. For example, if you have customers and prospects in China, you’re missing out on a wide range of opportunities if you’re not paying attention to the Chinese sites, like Renren, Sina Weibo and Tencent Weibo.
Bank BNP Paribas, well-known for its creative social media marketing initiatives, has successfully tapped into a whole new community, thanks to innovative campaigns like We Are Tennis and sponsoring sports events like The BNP Open. From taking a peek into our Synthesio dashboard, we can see that the buzz around BNP has gone from conversations around bank services and credit cards to discussions and posts about sports. BNP has found a way to expand their community base – and social listening gives them the tools to seek out these conversations, drill down and engage.
Providing Real Time Customer Service
From social listening, a bank’s customer service team can seek out customer issues and collect insights to establish real-time communication between the bank and its consumers. Without discussing the customer’s private account details, the bank’s social media team can identify and evaluate customer issues as they happen, and then take the conversation offline or refer the customer to the appropriate link or customer service number. Not only will customers be delighted by the efficient real time customer service they receive – raw, authentic consumer insights from social listening will also provide the intelligence your bank needs to improve service, customer satisfaction, and sales.
Always Being Prepared for Escalating Crises
The right social listening tool will provide you with the opportunity to track and analyze all conversations and sentiment around your company and industry across multiple social media channels, and help you discover and deal with social media icebergs as they happen – before they escalate. Define what a crisis is for your company, and build a crisis response chart with several levels of severity – this chart should outline who will be tasked with what in each situation. If your company Twitter account gets hacked or there is a thread of negative comments being posted about your brand in a forum, social listening will help you identify these issues in real time, and through your crisis response chart, your team will know exactly what process to follow in the event of a social media crisis.
Synthesio worked with a Financial Services client to create a social media communications plan involving a six-tiered alert process. For each tier (level of crisis) an alert system was put in place to ensure the appropriate employee for each tier was alerted at the time of crisis.
Archiving Content and Engagement
The Financial Services regulator, FINRA, requires that all social media content is stored for at least three years. Last year, the SEC announced a ‘risk alert’ on the use of social media by financial advisors, which emphasized the importance of compliance policies including record-keeping and third-party content. It’s imperative for Financial Services organizations to leverage a social listening solution that will archive all company posts and engagement to ensure you and your team stay inline with industry regulations.
Last year, Morgan Stanley Smith Barney granted its 17,000 financial advisers partial access to Twitter and LinkedIn. In order for the tweets to comply with securities regulations, Financial Advisors are required to draw from a prescribed archive of Twitter messages and submit LinkedIn postings for approval – and in turn, the tweeted and posted content gets archived.
Are you listening to what your community is saying about your financial services organization and your competitors? What’s your strategy to becoming compliantly active in social media? For further reading check out our post 6 Steps to Effective Social Listening for Financial Services
