How Financial Services Institutions Can Drive Better Personalization and Campaign Performance

When it comes to driving customer acquisition and loyalty, experience is king. This shouldn’t come as a surprise, considering customer experience (CX) has been a key tenet of marketing for a long time. Today’s clients are savvier than ever, however. They expect to be drawn into more personalized experiences that keep them engaged and motivated to stay loyal to a brand. In fact, 91% of consumers say they are more likely to do business with brands that recognize, remember, and provide them with relevant offers and recommendations.

This increased focus on personalization requires financial institutions to be fully armed with insights into how their customers perceive and want to interact with their brand — at the macro (i.e., brand) level and the micro (i.e., branch or broker) level. That’s because, at the end of the day, it’s all about creating trust: clients need to trust the institution they choose to work with. Marketers, as stewards of the company’s brand, play an integral role in creating that trust by delivering highly tailored experiences. The more insight marketers have at their fingertips, the better those experiences can be.

In short, the CX motion feeds the marketing team. Suppose you have customers publicly advocating for your brand. In that case, new prospects who are in the market for those same products and services will feel validated by seeing the positive experiences of others. New customers do a ton of research before signing up, so it’s critical your company has a comprehensive understanding of what customers are saying about you — and your competitors. That, in turn, allows you, as a marketer, to act on that information at scale. 

It seems easy on paper, right?  Where this breaks down in practice is in three main areas:

3 Challenges to Implementing a CX Program

1. Technology is often siloed, with different teams not only using different technologies but interacting with the same technologies in different ways.
2. Many marketing teams lack a cohesive data strategy, data roadmap, and/or the proper access to uncover the key insights needed to deliver hyper-personalized experiences. Acquisitions, mergers, and other limitations result in copious amounts of hunting and pecking across systems.
3. New social channels have emerged as popular avenues for customers to share feedback (good and bad), but they require much more monitoring, interaction, and mining to glean actionable information. 

At the end of the day, it all comes down to being able to bring together people, processes, tools, channels, lifecycle stages, data, insights, and more to deliver the best possible CX.

Turning Insight into Action with Reputation and LeapPoint

As the leading customer sentiment analysis platform, Reputation enables “eyes” and “ears” to see and listen in every space that your customers are talking.  LeapPoint helps by connecting the dots between Reputation and the rest of your marketing tech stack (plus your people and processes) to make sure you can turn those customer insights into action at scale.  

During a recent webinar, Don McAdang, managing director of commercial services at LeapPoint, and Phil Rapisardo, director of product marketing at Reputation, explored how marketing teams can leverage customer sentiment data to operationalize learnings across departments, improve campaigns, and increase customer acquisition and loyalty.  

5 Positive Impacts of Using Customer Sentiment Data

Here are five key takeaways from the presentation (to get more detail, tune in on-demand):

1. Financial institutions often use surveys to get a pulse on their customers — and surveys are important.  But there is often a big difference between what customers will say to you versus what they will say about you. When you put multiple channels of feedback (public and private) together across the entire customer journey, that’s where you can truly uncover the insights you need to transform your marketing efforts.
2. Technology is great, but value can only truly be realized when it’s properly integrated and implemented across the enterprise.  Is the customer sentiment data you’re gathering being fed back into your other systems to help shape messaging and content? Are alerts being routed to the right place? Are there Service Level Agreements in place for responding to customer feedback? These components are all critical to success. 
3. Speaking of processes, customer sentiment data needs to be organized and paired with other data to gain better insights. This starts with a data strategy and a process for organizing and aggregating data the right way. Companies need to be disciplined in how data gets collected and organized. What are the flows? Where is the active source of truth? How does that get translated across multiple systems?
4. Once you’ve transformed your data into insights, you need to make it accessible and ensure it is integrated with the other reporting tools you have in your technology stack. The native reporting capabilities of Reputation’s customer sentiment data platform can be coupled with other analytic tools and further enriched by first-party data you’re gathering within your organization.  
5. And finally, gathering and analyzing customer feedback is just the first step. You need to define how you’re going to use feedback to change the way you do business or engage with customers. Make sure you have a regular cadence to discuss the insights and prioritize the actions you should be taking to truly drive impact — across marketing and the business.

Interested in learning more about how you can integrate customer sentiment data into your overall marketing strategy to take campaigns and CX to the next level? Watch the full webinar on-demand or get in touch with us 1:1.