Socially Engaging Banking

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1 Accenture Interactive Point of View Series on : Enabling a digital first mindset Socially Engaging

2 Operating Model Socially Engaging Relationship Management Intelligence Integrated Experience Design First Everywhere Post-login Customer Experience Socially Engaging Socially Engaging is one of seven enablers that can help financial services providers renew the customer experience in the digital era. Adopting a First mindset putting digital at the heart of the business enables banks to redefine their relationship with their customers. Find out more: Social media has become an important tool for consumers wanting to share experiences, connect and learn more about different companies and their products. Rather than trust the claims of mass market advertising, consumers increasingly rely on recommendations from friends or other buyers like themselves via brand sites, communities of interest, online review sites, tweets or Facebook likes, for instance when making purchasing decisions. Such conversations are controlling the zero moment of truth for individuals and can have a profound impact on brand image. But are financial services companies listening? Banks need to be party to those conversations and find innovative ways to communicate with their customers to increase word-of-mouth recommendations, drive sales, and meet the evolving needs of existing and potential customers. Socially engaging banking is an important way to gather insights, demonstrate transparency, develop new products and engage customers. Leading organizations do not just use social to gather insights; they make it part of an integrated customer experience strategy across channels and understand when to use the right social media tool in the customer journey. Why Does Socially Engaging Matter? To encourage greater interaction, banks need to integrate social across their entire customer experience. Most customer experience models reflect banks internal organizational frameworks, often resulting in mixed messages and a bumpy customer experience. Creating a socially engaging bank that listens intently to consumers can foster a more customer-centric approach that will help alleviate frustration, boost sales and influence recommendations. A customer experience structure that is social by design can help: Burnish the brand image: By listening to what consumers are saying about the company and its products, banks can monitor their reputation and take appropriate action. As well as mitigating risk, socially engaging banking can help build a branded community and motivate supporters to act as advocates. Step-up customer service: Companies can use social media to connect with customers and improve their experience. As well as addressing any customer issues, companies can use social media to build trust by responding to individual questions and engaging in dialogues with customers. Develop innovative products: Banks can mine collective intelligence from crowdsourcing, where the masses unite to solve problems and drive innovation. Working together as a think tank, consumers can co-create products they want and need. Companies can avoid costly marketing launches by gauging consumer sentiment about existing or new products and services in the beta phase to feed back into the development cycle. Improve marketing and sales: Marketing and sales organizations can improve campaign effectiveness by employing profile clustering and real-time analytics to feed their databases dynamically with customers social interests.

3 Socially Engaging : Key Principles Some financial services companies have already started restructuring their customer service and marketing functions around social media to differentiate themselves in a competitive marketplace. Engage audience with several communities aggregated on relevant interests and topics Build community with ideas 1. Comprehend your position Engage in dialogue Have on-going business interactions with Social Media customers 2. Address customer needs Achieve results integrating Social Media as an engaging layer (or service platform) 3. Develop new offerings Drive business results

4 Banks can create a new customer experience paradigm shaped around the following principles: Build communities With socially engaging banking, institutions can capture customer interests and activities through like or share buttons to develop communities. These communities can be based on common interests such as products, financial need, non-financial need and customer segments to drive service and sales while addressing customer privacy needs. Banks can engage branded communities in dialogues, identify influencers, and most importantly, create content that customers want to share. Doing so will help promote cross-selling, retention, acquisition and better customer service. For instance, BBVA gathers data from Twitter, YouTube and Facebook to summarize the activity of its 3.7 million social network community members. It uses interactive graphics with dynamic data to provide insights on customer interests and interactions the bank can use. As a result, BBVA is able to provide timely updates for its customers and respond to trending topics. Engage users To drive regular interaction with customers, socially engaging banks integrate all marketing initiatives with social media activities and include social in competitive benchmarking. The marketing organization defines the best social media content for individual customer profiles and attracts them with defined content. The bank becomes a trusted ally, able to address customer needs and play an active role along the entire purchasing path, instead of engaging the customer only at the point of purchase. The more the bank interacts with customers, the more information about customers lives and habits that can be collected to refine communities and profiles. ICICI Bank, for instance, has created a rich range of Facebook offerings, such as a bank account app, money personality app, deal-of-the-day offers sections, offers on banking products and services and a mechanism for customers to provide feedback. The bank increased daily visits to the site by offering smart banking tips, safe banking practices and product information, as well as games, fun applications and contests. Drive business Information from social media activities can be linked with customer profiles to create more personalized marketing initiatives and products. Banks can also use social and crowdsourcing to develop new products or services for specific profiles. Companies can then use the information to create viral campaigns, social content hubs, and location-based initiatives for the new products and services. American Express, for instance, developed the Go Social platform to help small and midsize merchants create and autonomously manage commercial campaigns across the Amex network and social sites. Merchants draw upon Amex s customer knowledge to design offers and pay for ads on social sites with Amex membership reward points. During the program s first phase, merchants acquisition rate increased considerably. Conclusion Listen to your customer Monitoring what consumers are saying about your company underpins all social media activities. Companies can then experiment to find what works best in reaching target audiences, determining relevant marketing, sales and customer service tactics. Information can be honed to develop tailored propositions for specific segments or persons instead of one-size-fits-all campaigns. UBS, for example, has a global social media listening service that identifies topics where the bank can, and should, connect with customers. It allows UBS to mitigate risk and fulfill important communication objectives in reputation management, customer trust and brand. Create a Social Governance Model Companies need to establish accountability for their social media capabilities. Social media governance can be centralized or delegated among individual business units with the strategy coordinated by a core group. The best approach will depend on where a company is in its social adoption and where digital activities are housed. Social media owners become responsible for changing the mindset of the entire business from the CEO to operations helping them to recognize social s crucial role in connecting with the customer. Consumers are increasingly using social media to stay informed and communicate with businesses and people. Banks will need to restructure their customer experience activities around social to differentiate their business in the market and reap the benefits of the consumer age. Socially engaging banking can help improve cross-selling, brand value, and the customer experience today. It also positions institutions for the market shift toward the age of co-creation, where consumers help develop the personalized products and services they wish to buy.

5 To learn more about building digital capabilities in banking, contact: Joydeep Bhattacharya Jon Lovatt-Young Piercarlo Gera About Accenture Interactive Accenture Interactive helps the world s leading brands drive superior marketing performance across the full multichannel customer experience. Working with over 4,000 Accenture professionals dedicated to serving the marketing function, Accenture Interactive offers integrated, industrialized and industry-driven marketing solutions and services across consulting, technology and outsourcing powered by analytics. or visit accenture.com/interactive. About Accenture Accenture is a global management consulting, technology services and outsourcing company, with approximately 259,000 people serving clients in more than 120 countries. Combining unparalleled experience, comprehensive capabilities across all industries and business functions, and extensive research on the world s most successful companies, Accenture collaborates with clients to help them become high-performance businesses and governments. The company generated net revenues of US$27.9 billion for the fiscal year ended Aug. 31, Its home page is Copyright 2013 Accenture All Rights Reserved. Accenture, its logo, and High Performance Delivered are trademarks of Accenture. This document makes descriptive reference to trademarks that may be owned by others. The use of such trademarks herein is not an assertion of ownership of such trademarks by Accenture and is not intended to represent or imply the existence of an association between Accenture and the lawful owners of such trademarks. Information regarding third-party products, services and organizations was obtained from publicly available sources, and Accenture cannot confirm the accuracy or reliability of such sources or information. Its inclusion does not imply an endorsement by or of any third party. The views and opinions in this article should not be viewed as professional advice with respect to your business.