Social Listening for Banking, financial services and insurance (BFSI)
Shefali Mathur
It was the breadcrumbs that saved Hansel and Gretel and brought them home, from the clutches of an evil witch. While we have to commend Hansel’s presence of mind, breadcrumbs were the hero of the story. This is because breadcrumbs help you find your path, whether it’s your way back home or to your desired destination.
Now why are we talking about these little pieces of dried bread?
For us, customer conversations are the breadcrumbs and the destination is a better support process and journey. Being a customer-centric brand (as you should be), you need these tiny sprinkles to know what your customers are talking about, their experiences and their grievances. If taken seriously, these breadcrumbs can help you in two ways:
- Build your reputation as an empathetic brand
- Help you generate more business by adding more products or services
Breadcrumbs = Customer Conversations via Social Listening
If you are a brand proprietor or a business owner, these breadcrumbs are super valuable to help you offer the customer experience your clientele deserves. This is especially true when it comes to the members of the BFSI (Banking and Financial Services and Insurance) who handle critical information daily.
Social listening for Banking, financial services and insurance (BFSI) should ideally comprise of:
- Proactive online reputation management.
- Tools of the trade to track the brand mentions.
- A team which is ready 24/7 to regulate these mentions and resolve critical complaints in real time.
- A unified solution to view the overall customer perception of the brand (negative, positive or neutral)
What is Social Listening?
At its core, social listening is the process of monitoring digital conversations to understand what customers are saying about a brand or industry online. However, it extends far beyond tracking hashtags.
Through sentiment analysis, influencer engagement, and the generation of word clouds, social listening offers a comprehensive view of public opinion and behaviour.
It involves analysing conversations across various platforms to gather consumer insights, allowing BFSI entities to tailor their offerings and improve customer experience significantly.
This visual representation from the Locobuzz dashboard highlights how social listening goes beyond simple metrics to provide a deep dive into customer sentiment and engagement.
Channel-Specific Insights and Consumer Behaviour
Consumer behaviour in BFSI is multifaceted and varies greatly across different digital platforms. This is because different departments serve very different clientele who might seek resolutions in different versions across different mediums.
For instance, someone with a need for salary account benefits is more likely to connect with the brand’s CX team on Instagram or Twitter page because this fairly young audience wants quick acknowledgement of their problems and what better than these platforms?
In case you need an insight into what may be your platform with most activities, here’s a brief overview of channel-wise (platform-wise) segmentation for your customer experience.
- Twitter serves as a bustling hub of chatter where consumers often share instant feedback, complaints, or queries related to their financial services.
- Facebook plays a crucial role in branding, with institutions leveraging the platform to broadcast their values, mission, and customer-centric initiatives.
- Instagram is another powerful tool for branding, especially for visually showcasing the human side of finance, from customer stories to behind-the-scenes glimpses. This is a great way for B2C brands to market themselves with like-minded communities that comprise of a potentially loyal audience and solid clientele.
- YouTube emerges as a community-building platform, ideal for educating consumers through informative content, tutorials, and personal finance advice. While this may not be the place where you will have an explicit customer support segment, the comments section plays a huge role in understanding customer sentiment.
Each platform offers unique insights into consumer behaviour, from the types of products that are popular to the specific grievances customers face at different stages of the buying or service usage cycles.
Addressing Customer Experience and Support with Social Listening
The BFSI sector frequently grapples with the dual challenges of providing exceptional customer experience and robust support. Traditional methods such as Interactive Voice Response (IVR) systems and customer satisfaction surveys often fall short of capturing the immediacy and nuance of customer feedback.
This gap leaves a vast space for misunderstandings and missed opportunities to address customer needs effectively.
Fostering Innovation through Customer Interactions
Social listening for banking, financial services and insurance (BFSI) runs on data aggregation across multiple platforms to offer a holistic view of customer grievances and experiences. This aggregation process goes beyond the surface level, diving deep into the sentiment and context behind customer interactions.
When BFSI institutions analyse this comprehensive dataset, they gain actionable insights into common problems, unmet needs, and customer expectations. This wealth of information is pivotal in creating value-added services that resonate well with their target audience.
For instance, this is relevant for loan applications, credit card applications, etc., where customer opinion helps determine their requirements and connect them with the best offering the brand has. It also helps avoid misalignment of services from their target audience and offers tailored services and resolutions (wherever needed)
The Power of Aggregated Insights
One of the most significant advantages of social listening is its ability to spark innovation. By monitoring and analysing customer conversations, BFSI companies can identify gaps in the market, uncover emerging trends, and understand the specific features or services customers are seeking.
McKinsey is one such example that initially considered overhauling its technology to reduce dispute resolution times. However, after gathering customer feedback and conducting interviews, they discovered that the major issue for customers was not the processing time but the lack of status updates.
By focusing on what truly disturbed customers, the company was able to address the problem more effectively and with less effort, significantly improving customer experience
This direct line to customer feedback serves as a fertile ground for developing new offerings that directly address consumer desires and pain points.
Tackling the Core Issue of Customer Experience Management
The core issue within the BFSI sector when it comes to managing customer experience is the reliance on outdated and passive feedback mechanisms. IVR and surveys, for instance, often do not capture the customer’s immediate reaction or the full spectrum of their experience.
They are, by nature, reactive rather than proactive, and this can lead to a delayed or incomplete understanding of customer satisfaction.
How Social Listening Offers a Solution
Social listening is not limited to capturing mentions but utilising these mentions to offer better customer experiences, streamline customer support, add new services or product features or shut down existing branches that are not popular among your customers.
It works great as a platform for engagement and, as a crucial source of consumer insights, outpaces traditional market research methods in both scale and cost-effectiveness.
This will help you create a niche for your services, enhance your brand recall and of course, save the extra expenses that go into managing dead-end features.
Awareness
By keeping a pulse on customer conversations, BFSI companies become immediately aware of both positive feedback and emerging issues, allowing for swift action.
Strong Brand Presence
Engaging with customers directly on social media helps build a relatable and responsive brand image, which is crucial for customer loyalty and trust.
Greater Share of Voice
By actively participating in conversations and addressing customer needs, BFSI institutions can increase their share of voice in the industry, reflecting a brand that listens and adapts to its customer base.
Product Development and Service Improvement
Insights gained from social listening directly inform product development and service improvements, ensuring that new offerings are aligned with customer expectations.
Brilliant Customer Experience
Social listening enables BFSI companies to preemptively solve problems and engage customers in meaningful ways, leading to a superior overall customer experience.
Proactive Strategy
Instead of reacting to customer complaints, social listening allows BFSI entities to anticipate needs and trends, thereby crafting a forward-thinking customer service strategy that addresses issues before they escalate.
Expanding Social Listening Beyond Traditional Analytics
The essence of social listening for Banking, financial services and insurance (BFSI) highlights its capability to not only gather data across various social platforms but also to qualify and analyse this data effectively.
With an emphasis on the importance of data qualification—whether through automated processes, manual intervention, or the use of artificial intelligence and machine learning—the discussion underscores the critical role of sentiment analysis in driving brand reputation and risk management.
Data Visualisation and Distribution: Key to Organisational Alignment
Finance bros are numbers people. And for the right reasons too! Numbers are quantifiable, tangible and give you a clear direction of where strategy is leading you to. Which is why, your preference is most likely to have the social listening capabilities, married with reporting analytics.
We know that your social listening capabilities need a strong data representation, preferably visual.
The ability to create simple yet insightful visuals and dashboards is paramount. This not only aids in the consolidation of data but also in its distribution across the organisation, ensuring that insights are shared effectively and can influence strategic decisions.
The Importance of Integration
Integration emerges as a pivotal theme, highlighting the necessity for social listening platforms to seamlessly connect with existing data warehouses or business intelligence dashboards.
This connectivity ensures that social listening insights are readily accessible and actionable, aligning closely with the organisation’s key performance indicators (KPIs).
Moving Forward with Social Listening
For BFSI companies, leveraging the capabilities of social listening means embracing a tool that offers deep insights into consumer behaviour, sentiment, and preferences. It allows for a proactive approach to product development, customer service improvement, and competitive benchmarking.
By analysing and visualising data, institutions can ensure that their strategies are informed by real-time feedback and trends, fostering a culture of innovation and responsiveness.
Locobuzz’s unified customer experience platform can help you view your customer interactions in a simplified manner.
Want to see what your customers are saying about you? Perhaps you want to understand what is not working for them. Maybe you want to see a leak in your existing product and maybe, your customers might have the answer.
Locobuzz helps you view all that and more!
Social Listening in Your Superpower
Make it your trump card with Locobuzz!
