This shift has flipped the script on traditional marketing. A flashy ad campaign might still turn heads, but it’s the candid social media posts that are shaping a bank’s brand.
Listening in: The power of social media
Social listening enables banks to tune in to what people are saying about them online. They can monitor dialogues about the bank, spot trends, and identify insights about key competitors. Banks can also use social media platforms proactively to humanize their brands by employing brand ambassadors to promote the bank’s products and services through their social channels.
Then there’s social monitoring—the art of tracking brand mentions and jumping in when needed. But it’s not just about spotting the chatter—it’s about understanding why someone’s talking. Are they frustrated? Curious? Sharing a positive story? Knowing the “why” helps banks respond in a way that solves the problem. Sprinklr, a customer experience management platform vendor, tells us “one of the simplest and most direct ways for customers to voice their thoughts is by tagging brands on social media to ask questions, make statements or share complaints; neglecting to reach out and respond to these customers means overlooking a critical and substantial aspect of your customer service efforts.”1
As consumers spend more time engaged with social media, it has become central to their day-to-day activities. As one banker put it, “we don’t count on social media to conduct customer service, but customers will communicate with us through social media and private messaging to ask questions or ask for help.”2
The secret sauce: Customer journey analytics
Resolving issues on social media has pushed banks to develop the capability for their customer service agents to intervene and handle customer resolution cases quickly and efficiently. One strategy is to encourage social commenters to engage directly with the bank, via mobile banking or the call center, so that a representative of the bank can validate their identity and begin the issue resolution process.
Once the commenter is identified as the bank’s customer, the commentary and activity on social media can be grafted onto the detailed bank channel interaction data for the customer. By linking these interactions with the bank’s internal data, teams can see how customers move across channels to get things done. This is the heart of customer journey analytics—understanding not just what customers are doing, but how and why they’re doing it, so banks can make every step smoother.
Using language models, banks can analyze social media posts to detect unresolved tasks and gauge sentiment in real time. This is where ClearScape Analytics shines. It offers powerful text analysis tools and even lets banks plug in their own open-source language models through flexible Bring Your Own Model framework. Behind the scenes, the ClearScape Analytics® sessionization toolkit aligns timestamps across all kinds of customer interaction data, making it easier to see the full picture. And with its signature nPath sequence logic, banks can connect the dots across massive datasets to understand customer behavior at scale.
In a world where every post could be a problem—or an opportunity—the banks that listen, learn, and act with precision will be the ones that thrive. With ClearScape Analytics® in their toolkit, they’re not just reacting to customer needs—they’re anticipating them.
- “What’s the Difference Between Social Monitoring and Social Listening?” Sprinklr, 2023.
- American Bankers Association, “The State of Social Media in Banking”, 2023.