How to leverage Social Listening to grow your BFSI business

“Social media is not for us. That's not where our customers are” is what you would hear from decision-makers at banks and other financial businesses less than a decade ago.

Much has changed since then.

Today, most future-forward financial businesses depend on digital platforms to start and build relationships with modern tech-savvy consumers. These users engage with your brand and talk about it on social media and review sites. So, are you listening to what they are saying?

If your business has not enabled advanced social listening across customer touchpoints, you are unlikely to:

1. Become aware of crucial industry and brand insights, which means missing out on white space opportunities.

2. Analyze current content and customer care strategies to differentiate your brand from competitors.

3. Proactively identify crises, regulatory compliance issues, and reputational risks, which can snowball into something more serious.

The good news is that our Social Listening tool can help. It can get you tons of actionable customer insights from an ocean of digital conversations while complying with all data and privacy regulations.

Trends transforming the BFSI industry

From completely-digital onboarding to super-apps, technology is a driving force for modern financial systems. The banking, financial services, and insurance (BFSI) industry has become reliant on smart devices. As we rethink the future of banking, here are the top trends shaping the industry and the marketplace in a post-COVID world:

Introducing Sprinklr’s Social Listening for BFSI

To build meaningful relationships, you need to know what your customers are saying on digital media. And while tracking these conversations, it is essential to keep user data confidential and their privacy intact.

Sprinklr’s social listening platform gives you access to more than 500 million conversations every day on 30+ digital and social channels in a licensed and compliant way.

Our advanced query building and Entity filters allow you to gain unlimited insights from 200 billion historical messages scattered across X, formerly Twitter, news, blogs, and forums dating back to July 2014.

Our AI-powered listening dashboard adds value by:

• Listening to and identifying business opportunities from real-time customer conversations.

• Ensuring compliance with PII masking, GDPR compliance, governance, audit reports, entity detection, and persona reports.

• Filtering out spam with eight layers of data cleansing.

• Improving your productivity and time to insight (TTI) by providing automatic alerts and smart insights.

• Proactively detecting and managing online crises and risks.

Did You Know

Sprinklr Named Leader in The Forrester Wave™: Social Listening Platforms, Q4 2020

Forrester Research evaluated ten vendors based on 36 criteria — Sprinklr received among the highest scores in the criteria of data, setup, performance, supporting services, and revenue.

Read the Report

1. Build a stronger brand

What are people saying about your brand on different platforms? Does your target audience think your services are among the top five? What is the public sentiment toward your brand’s stand on matters related to politics, world affairs, and financial stability?

Get answers to such questions with our Social Listening tool that helps you identify your audiences, where they are, and what they think about your brand. Utilize this information to improve the brand health and recall value of both own and sub-brands.

The solution also monitors your customer engagement strategy to discover brand differentiation opportunities with compliance requirements in check.

How Social Listening helps

New-age financial institutions are aware that a solid online brand identity is a strategic priority – it builds trust, ensures stable profits, and makes customer acquisition much easier.

But to forge a more consistent and powerful brand image, you need to deeply understand your customers and their journey across digital channels. Besides, it is useful to capture top sentiments and trends related to the BFSI industry.

Sprinklr’s market-leading social listening technology helps you do that by listening to customer conversations and generating real-time smart notifications on high-impact brand and competitor activities.

Sprinklr Listening covers the broadest range of social networks and messaging platforms and taps into millions of publicly available news and review sites, forums, and blogs.

Furthermore, we offer access to executive-level dashboards to empower CXOs to make sense of all this data at a glance. This console delivers daily/weekly analyses of social data and relevant industry trends in an easy-to-consume manner.

Social Listening also improves your understanding of brand awareness, customer loyalty, and customer satisfaction scores (CSAT). Such insights into your business’s existing relationship with the customer help you strategize ways to grow trust.

Most importantly, our AI-powered content analysis tool eliminates human bias. This feature guarantees you will make branding decisions based on accurate online research insights.

Success Story

A prominent UK-based bank wanted to conduct a social listening exercise to understand the public perception of its brand during a global financial crisis.

Sprinklr’s Brand Listening dashboard, which covers brand health and employee and investor conversations, was used to analyze netizens’ sentiments regarding the crisis in the banking industry. Lots of negative chatter and hashtags were detected – most of them featuring speculation and panic around the threat of the bank becoming insolvent.

Without investing in long-drawn group discussions or surveys, Social Listening enabled the bank to leverage freely-available online data to understand customers' concerns. Based on those insights, the bank proactively communicated reassuring messages to customers about its current and future financial stability.

2. Preempt and avoid brand crises

Nothing spells doom for your company’s online image like an angry bunch of tweets about delayed delivery of your credit card or lousy customer service at a particular branch. These mentions become a public talking point that gains notoriety. This, in turn, can lead to lawsuits and even brand boycotts.

To quickly and proactively identify and mitigate the crisis, regulatory compliance, and reputational risk, Social Listening is a reliable solution.

How Social Listening helps

Whether your bank has a social media presence, customers will talk about you on digital platforms. On the one hand, you could think of this as free and authentic publicity. On the other hand, unchecked negative feedback leaves your brand vulnerable to crises.

Sprinklr platform sets up a mature early warning system (EWS) with automated triaging, routing, and actionability for prompt and appropriate responses to events that might affect your bank’s reputation,

Social Listening detects changes or anomalies in online activity in real time. And “noise-free” AI-powered Smart Alerts (online and SMS) about negative mentions are shared in 15 crisis conversation categories, including brand and HR, marketing and sales, IT and security, and adverse events.

Sprinklr’s technology helps avoid organization-wide panic by defining data access rights with multi-tiered entity-level governance. This ensures that only authorized people within your organization receive alerts about negative mentions.

3. Improve customer service

Today, customers and prospects proactively share their brand experiences and feedback online. This amounts to exabytes of data every day. All this data can be harnessed to enhance customer engagement.

Is your bank able to sieve through thousands of online customer queries? Are you able to identify service and product issues from complaints and resolve them quickly?

If not, our social listening tool can take care of the repetitive and mundane task of managing customer service via social media. This will ensure that retaining customer loyalty doesn't cost your business several hundred person-hours.

How Social Listening helps

Unhappy customers seldom return to your brand. As banking becomes customer-centric and digital-first, banks need to be smart enough to catch and react to large volumes of complaints and queries on time.

With Social Listening, you can capture customer experience in real-time around digital (mobile, online, phone, and social media banking) and transactional banking offerings (savings, CDs, cards, mortgages, loans, etc.).

And thanks to our AI-powered, live listening and engagement tools, you can gain product-level data from customer conversations. It follows customers from within their preferred channel at every stage of their buying journey.

Finally, for banks, managing the security of large quantities of personal information is a priority as threats grow in complexity. To protect each social media user’s sensitive and identifiable information, Social Listening activates PII masking.

Success Story

Standard Chartered Bank leverages a mix of channels to interact with customers in 59 markets. The multinational banking and financial services company wanted to find a way to track these customers’ different behaviors and expectations to deliver personalized service in real-time.

The bank used Sprinklr’s social listening capabilities and sentiment analysis to monitor conversations across all channels in the 31 retail markets.

Social Listening revolutionized Standard Chartered’s ability to understand customer behavior and recommend the right products. By tracking customer conversations, the brand was able to gain insights into everything from spending habits to financial and investment needs.

4. Grow the global reach of your company’s marketing efforts

Sometimes, a marketing campaign that worked in one territory might fail miserably in the other. This could be due to the lack of a distinctive local flavor in your strategy.

Social Listening can monitor your bank’s geo-specific campaigns and their reception by the target audience. Thus, our listening tool gives you the ammunition to tailor your messaging and engage with regional customers at the right time and with the right context.

How Social Listening helps

To scale your banking business, you need to extend your marketing reach and distribution to different cities and beyond. But a one-size-fits-all approach won’t work when getting messaging right in each region.

Social Listening offers the perfect remedy by tracking and analyzing social data (in multiple languages) without geographical limitations. We also automatically identify sentiment-based reach for conversations within specific regions.

Additionally, Social Listening delivers region-wise updates on competitors’ local marketing activities so that you can plan your outreach accordingly.

Success Story

A financial group ran a marketing campaign to promote social betterment through sporting events across Canada. But in Calgary, the online engagement around this campaign was quite low.

Using Sprinklr’s listening dashboard, the company was able to track the likes of positive and negative mentions and top themes during the campaign period (divided by region).

The social listening tool identified the most influential and brand-positive voices in Calgary. The company leveraged these handles to improve campaign performance in the city.

5. Stay ahead of the curve with competitive benchmarking

No competition, no progress. This adage rings true even for your financial business.

Are your rivals launching new products? Are they changing their marketing strategy? Or are they going after the wrong target group? Keeping tabs on the competition is imperative.

Use Social Listening to study social media chatter around competitor activity and make more informed decisions for your banking business.

How Social Listening helps

As a finance company, you are not just up against traditional and like-sized fintech companies. You are competing with larger incumbents and techfin firms like Google and Amazon. You need as much intel as possible to strategically hold your own against these giant market players.

Social Listening lets you map competitor activity and compare their banking products and services to yours. We also analyze the brand’s share of voice (SOV) to size up the competition’s brand visibility and assess who is dominating the online conversations.

What’s more? Our tool allows you to keep track of competitor reviews and ratings and identify industry-specific trending topics, key events, and opportunities before your competitors do.

Sprinklr for Banking and Financial Services

Taking an ear-to-the-ground approach with digital platforms is a must in a sensitive industry like BFSI.

With Sprinklr, you gain access to a single, unified platform that offers centralized control over all customer touchpoints and analyses. And by getting rid of point solutions, we allow financial services companies to procure data at scale.

Thanks to our omnichannel capability, you can track and engage with customers across 35+ channels. Meanwhile, our AI-first platform quickly turns large volumes of unstructured data into actionable and structured insights.

We do all this listening compliantly by standardizing governance and minimizing risk, so your customers stay protected from cyberattacks and fraud.