What is listings and reputation management and why do all financial brands need to master it now?

A comprehensive, brand-wide strategy for online listings, visibility, and reputation isn’t just for industries like retail and restaurants. Most financial brands rely heavily on brick-and-mortar locations for success, yet many have not invested in platforms and strategies to improve their online and offline customer experience (CX).

Today, online reviews influence 85% of consumers when choosing a local financial institution (FI), and 98% use online search to locate listings for nearby businesses. If your financial brand has even one physical location, it’s vital to support and maintain a strong, positive online presence — and the importance only grows as your business expands.

Online review and reputation management for financial brands ensures every customer relationship is built on trust. With an enhanced online presence, financial services can capture more attention, build stronger relationships, and convert passive searchers into life-long clients.

What is listings management?

Most people search for banks or other financial brands on search channels like Google, Apple Maps, NerdWallet, or Bing. Whether looking for a nearby ATM to grab quick cash, take out a major home loan, or find a new institution, nearly everyone relies on digital search during their customer journey.

Online listings must consistently land at or near the top of the search engine results page (SERP) to attract new customers and provide great CX for current ones. This is why listings management is critical for any brand reliant on physical locations.

In the simplest terms, listings management uses a platform and process to ensure online location listings — branches, ATMs, drive-through lanes, etc. — have complete, optimized, accurate, and consistently updated profiles across all search directories. Each listing should contain, at minimum, the following information for every location:

• Name of business
• Address
• Phone number
• Website
• Category
• Hours
• Description
• Photo

Some listing aspects may never change, like a name or address, while others do regularly. During the summer and over holidays, hours for banks can adjust frequently. Ensure any changing information is closely monitored and updated — something that’s easy to do with a listings management platform.

What is reputation management and review response?

Reputation management

A review management platform isn’t just about achieving a consistently positive reputation. Ultimately, reputation management is about creating fantastic end-to-end omnichannel customer experiences that build trust at every step of the financial journey.

A reputation management platform offers incredible access into your actual customers’ minds. By aggregating reviews onto a single feed — filterable by location, region, star rating, customer sentiment, keywords, and more — teams can access and understand precise, actionable, and data-packed insights in real time.

With this invaluable information, plus additional data from platform features like competitor comparison and in-depth reporting and analysis, FIs can make intelligent, agile, and informed decisions to improve the customer experience at a single location, enterprise-wide, and everything in between.

Furthermore, studies show that online reviews influence 85% of consumers when choosing an FI. Reviews also impact local search rankings. While Google keeps its exact algorithms a closely-held secret, it is estimated that around 15% of the SERP ranking is determined via review signals, including review quantity, quality, and responses.

Review response

Responding to online customer reviews is one of the easiest ways to boost retention, improve your online reputation, and increase customer engagement. Customers see their reviews not just as a moment-in-time reaction but as part of an ongoing two-way dialogue. Financial brands can accelerate brand loyalty and customer advocacy by actively engaging in that dialogue — and not leaving anyone hanging.

Did you know that 33% of people would change a negative review to a positive one if they received a genuine response back? 76% of consumers would update that negative review if a brand responded and resolved the complaint.

However, banks and other financial brands have work to do. While it’s recommended that brands at least hit an 80% review response score, banks and financial institutions only respond to about 36%. At Chatmeter, we encourage clients to reach 95% or above in their review response scores, as we believe every unanswered review is a missed opportunity.

Maybe this sounds like a great, but perhaps overwhelming, idea. That’s where reputation management tools like bulk review responses, suggested response generators and template libraries with 1000s of pre-loaded responses come in. In minutes, a single team member can reply to dozens, or even hundreds, of online reviews to strengthen loyalty and client connections.

Why listings and reputation matters for financial CX

While always important, keeping a close eye on listings and reputation management for financial brands is especially critical during the summer, holidays, and other special events. An estimated $10.3 billion in sales is lost annually due to missing or inaccurate information. Optimizing your listings is vital to your bank’s revenue streams, credibility, and consumer awareness year-round.

Imagine one of your customers needs to cash a check fast. She looks up the closest location for your bank on Apple Maps and drives there. But as she pulls up, she finds the building dark and the door locked. She then sees a small sign stating: “Bank Closed for Government Holiday.”

Needless to say, after driving all over town to complete a simple task to no avail, her precious time and energy drained, she’ll drive away with a too-light wallet — and a significantly lower impression of your bank than before.

Those negative sentiments might travel beyond a single customer’s disappointment if that customer happens to post online reviews. In minutes, the entire internet could soon read about her disappointing experience and maybe rethink their choice of financial institution.

Those negative feelings could have been avoided with an online listing platform. Special hours can be updated and scheduled for every branch, ATM, drive-through, or other branch location worldwide in just a few clicks. While she might have had to find an alternative bank either way, at least she would have been informed, saved time and stress, and almost certainly skipped writing that 1-star review.

Avoid the fate of that theoretical bank. No matter the size of your financial organization — 10 locations or over 10,000 — listings management is surprisingly easy even with a small marketing or operations team, including those mighty teams of one.

How to start a great listings and reputation strategy

For sustainable growth and satisfied clients across every point of their online and offline customer experience (CX), location-based financial institutions need strong reputation and listings management. As more location-based competitors — and those growing fintech brands — further invest in these technologies, FIs hesitating to adopt the tech will fall further behind.

Create exceptional CX after customers leave your storefront, log off the app, or withdraw money from the ATM. Drive loyalty and growth for your multi-location bank, credit union, tax service, insurance brand, check-cashing service, or another financial sector with Chatmeter’s data-driven, user-friendly all-in-one platform.

Scalable and designed for growing multi-location brands, our comprehensive suite offers leading-edge listings and reputation solutions trusted by top financial institutions worldwide. Try our interactive listings management demo and reputation management demo.

Then schedule a fully-customized live demo with one of our friendly experts and see firsthand how Chatmeter can accelerate your financial brand’s success, revenue, and customer experience in no time.