The banking industry has improved significantly over the past few years. With the advent of internet banking facilities, people seemed to be quite satisfied with the services that banking firms were providing. Instant money transfers, updating customer profiles, credit/debit card application and more; the jobs that required the presence of the customer in banks could now be handled by simply making a few clicks on their laptop/computer screens. However, the world is changing fast and the demands from customers never cease to increase.
According to the 2014 World Retail Banking Report from Capgemini and Efma, for the first time in 3 years the banking industry saw a decline in positive customer experience. Today’s generation seem to have adapted well to the social media culture. This has led to increasing expectations from all brands and companies. With most other sectors taking to social media, to provide amazing customer support services, the expectations have risen even when it comes to banking solutions.
Once the realisation set in, banks started maintaining a facebook page or a twitter handle; however their activities remained restricted to branding and reputation maintenance and most banks kept their timelines limited and did not allow customers to post.
What they did not realise was that they needed to be there for their customers on social media and this could actually benefit them all.
Here’s what the banks need to do to increase customer satisfaction and generate more revenue at the same time:
1. Enhancing the customer support experiences:
By shifting from enterprise CRM to Social CRM, i.e. providing customer support through social media channels, banks can not only keep their customers happy but also get access to a lot of personal information of their customers, such as birthdays, family members, anniversaries, their spaces of interests and more. All these can be easily done by making use of advanced social media monitoring tools such as Simplify360. Depending on these data banks can customise their services such as credit card facilities, personal banking services and more helping practice targeted marketing with better results.
2. Happy customers equals better investors:
There is nothing better than staying in touch. Answer your customer’s questions more promptly and provide them with the best advices. This not only helps in gaining their trust but also instigates them to invest more with your brand due to increasing brand loyalty. For example, if your customer is looking at investing in real estate and they wish to depend on a home loan, providing them with information related to best home loan options, showing them choices of property and figuring out the process of payments and instalments etc. can actually leave them feeling happy and it is most likely that they will pick up the loan from your bank itself.
3. Stay aware of your mistakes:
There are a lot of times when we tend to ignore our own mistakes simply because they seem right to us. This can go grievously wrong, when it comes to an industry like banking, where you take responsibility of another person’s money. With social media becoming the talking space for most people today, customers often tend to vent their anger and the problems they are facing on platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. This can spoil your brand reputation as word travels fast here! Therefore monitoring social media channels can help you detect these problems with ease and deal with them instantly so your reputation stays at an all time high. Once you are aware of your mistakes it also gets easier to find solutions. In many cases your customers can provide you solutions as well!
4. Know your Competitors:
Being successful in an industry is not just dependent on what you are doing but it is a parameter which involves measuring your performance against your competitors. Social media is one space where your competitors cannot maintain their privacy and you can hence stay aware of what they are doing, when and how they are doing it. Keeping track of their behavior can also give you an idea about their marketing strategy and allow you to do it better than them.
5. More personal connect between employees and customers:
Customers like to be made feel special; therefore a more personalized conversation always helps and before you know your customers become your advocates.
Along with that, employees can also share useful information which is easily accessible by fellow employees as well as customers. This helps in information dissemination and closely knitting the workforce as well.