Embracing social media in customer communications

Guest blog post by Mark King, Senior VP, Europe and Africa, Aspect

In its 2011 report Social Banking: The Social Networking Imperative for Retail Banks, Accenture claims that while 90 per cent of financial institutions will dedicate funds for social media initiatives by 2012, the majority are still novices in the field. Forty two per cent of online adults are keen to engage with their financial providers using social media, according to a 2010 Forrester Research study.  However, Accenture suggests that few firms yet know how to generate significant business value from engaging with customers, partners and employees via this channel.

Aspect offers the following best practice tips for organisations looking to embrace social media in customer communications:

1. Engage with employees first: Before reaching out to customers, trial social media with your own staff. Find people that embrace the social scene and create ambassadors that can reach out internally and externally. Also engage social media-aware executives to influence more senior managers.

2. Align social initiatives with business goals: Such as how to grow revenue, or retain profitable customers. Campaigns that engage large numbers of people can sometimes end up creating lots of contacts but little value.

3. Monitor and analyse: Don’t just monitor social networks for positive and negative mentions of your organisation. Also identify and monitor networks where customers, competitors and commentators gather. Find out what they’re discussing, what technologies they’re using and feed this into your social planning.

4. Set business rules that determine how and when you engage with customers: This, together with the subsequent workflows that ensure issues are resolved rapidly and effectively, can unlock significant business value. Integrate social media communications into your overall customer contact strategy as a distinct channel and compare social media performance in the context of your total engagement strategy.

5. Set up direct customer contact options:  Where appropriate, provide customer contact options on your company Facebook and Linked In pages – including self-service pages and helpful Q&As – enabling customers to contact you directly. When Bank of America adopted Twitter for customer service, users said it was easier and faster than traditional channels. 

6. Use customer segmentation techniques: To target specific customer groupings. Accenture reported that Chase created an online community of mass-affluent consumers, working with them to design the highly successful Chase Priority Club Rewards card. 

7. Choose your technology wisely: Identify and implement what’s right for your business – and make use of existing customer contact investments such as workforce optimisation capabilities, workflow rules and call centre performance analytics to maximise efficiency and performance.

8. Bring experts into customer conversations: Using Presence technology, service agents can see the location of specialists and know whether they’re in meetings or available to talk. Customer interactions that start with customers hitting click-to-call buttons and speaking to agents can now progress to screen sharing with at-home experts.

When Bankers Were Good

Very good programme on BBC2 last night, Ian Hislop's When Bankers Were Good. And it had twice the audience of Jamie Oliver's latest show in the same slot on Channel Four. Always refreshing to see audiences choose something of substance over yet another bloody cookery show fronted by one of the most annoying men in the universe.

Bankers' reputations “have fallen below that of estate agents or even journalists" quipped Hislop, who argued that they had much to learn from their Victorian predecessors. The Private Eye head honcho took a look at such philanthropic Victorians as the Gurneys, a banking family of Quakers, Angela Burdett-Coutts, who was a sucker for a good cause, including the British Goat Society and prison reformer Elizabeth Fry (aka the lady on the back of the fiver).

Thoughtful, witty stuff and Hislop made for an amiable host. If you missed it, you can catch it here.

F-commerce on the rise

PayPal has unveiled Send Money, an application on Facebook which lets users send e-cards and money to friends. It's a move which seems like a no brainer, given that the site has more than 750 million users and a large percentage of them have active PayPal accounts.

It'll be interesting to see how many more businesses will take advantage of f-commerce. It certainly looks like an idea whose time has come. Twelve per cent of social media users have made a purchase from a Facebook store after seeing something on the site, according to the latest eCustomerServiceIndex (eCSI) results from eDigitalResearch and IMRG.

The results show an 8.8 per cent growth in f-commerce over four months as more and more retailers import their website functionality into the social networking site. The study also found that 25 per cent of online consumers now log onto Facebook more than once a day. Meanwhile, 97 per cent plan to log onto the internet this Christmas to browse and buy gifts. Twenty seven per cent will access the internet from their smartphone to browse and buy, whilst another nine per cent will use their tablet devices to do the same.

We have a winner!

I blogged a few weeks ago about the 2011 Best Dressed Banker Award.

This was organised by Savile Row tailors, Cad and the Dandy, set up by ex-bankers James Sleater and Ian Meiers. The shortlist included Credit Suisse Analyst, David Roditi; Francesco Chioccola of Credit Societe Generale; Sir Mervyn King, Governor of the Bank of England; and. Kweku Adoboli, Senior Trader at UBS. Yes, really. That guy.

But there can only be one winner and that is, and I quote the press release, "pretty, petite Michelle Flynn of Sapient’s client service."

Pretty, petite? Who writes this stuff? And what decade are they living in? Anyhoo, that's Michelle on the left, not dressed like your typical banker, it must be said. A controversial winner or will all bankers dress like this in the not too distant future? Message me if you can be bothered.

Payments Technology Conference review

In the process of writing a review of the FStech/Retail Systems Payments Technology Conference, which took place in London last week. It was a really good day, a full house and lots of excellent speakers and panellists. Thanks to the sponsors, all those who attended and took part and Paul Rodgers of Vendorcom who did a great job of chairing.

My review of the conference will appear in the November/December edition of FStech, but for the time being here are a few of the standout comments from the day:

Rob Brown, Group EPoS Systems: "What should retailers do to drive contactless adoption? Advertise the hell out of it."

Jeremy King, European Director, PCI SSC: "It is not just protecting card data. If you have an e-commerce site, it is about protecting all your data. That is what PCI DSS can bring you."

Alan Moss, Marketing Director, VeriFone NW Europe, Middle East and Africa: "Retailers have taken so long to roll-out contactless as there hasn't been a convincing value proposition."

Paul Rodgers, Chairman, Vendorcom: "PCI never was and never will be an IT problem. The whole business needs to be involved."

Jeremy King, European Director, PCI SSC: "When we talk about contactless, there are four key words, United States of America. It hasn't adopted EMV or chip and pin but it is likely to go contactless. That will be a big driver."

Mark McMurtrie, Marketing Director, S1: "Banks still have a major role to play in this brave new world of payments."

Carl-Olav Scheible, UK MD, PayPal: "The pace of change is so great even PayPal is struggling to keep up."

Paul Rodgers, Chairman, Vendorcom: "We're in this together and that's a message that doesn't always sit comfortably with the wider industry."

Alex Kwiatkowski, Research Manager, EMEA Banking, IDC Financial Insights: "NFC may be hip but it's massively over-hyped."

Simon Austin, Commercial Director, Bank Machine: "In 2010, there were only 1.7 million contactless transactions processed in the UK. Pathetic!"

Phil Edwards, Head of Business Development, O2 Money: "We're not looking to take on the banks. Our strength lies in mobile."

Further information on the conference here.

Payments Technology Conference

Quick reminder that it's our Payments Technology Conference on Thursday (held in association with sister title, Retail Systems).

It's taking place at The IoD Hub and entry is free to financial institutions and retailers. Great line up of speakers and panellists, including Best Buy Europe, PayPal, Citibank, HSBC, Barclaycard, Bank Machine, Lloyds Banking Group and Clinton Cards.

There are still a few places left so, if you would like to come along, click here.