How banks can use online reviews and customer sentiment to drive growth

Most consumers today have spent most — if not their entire lives — closely connected to the internet. The customer experience (CX) no longer relates solely to face-to-face interactions. It extends to every online and offline experience. They won’t hesitate to switch brands if that journey doesn’t feel streamlined, user-friendly, and trustworthy at every touch point.

This applies just as much to financial institutions as any other location-based industry. From teller interactions to mobile banking apps to signing a first home loan, every touchpoint must precisely meet or exceed your customers’ expectations for the largest and smallest actions.

But what exactly are those expectations? That’s easier to decipher than you might think! Financial brands that integrate customer sentiment analytics and business intelligence (BI) software into their tech stack can pinpoint CX expectations precisely at a specific location, enterprise-wide, or anything in-between. It’s also a technology with a rapid adoption rate by banks, credit unions, tax service providers, and other financial institutions — all of which see the positive impacts of profoundly understanding their valued clientele.

As significant investments are increasingly made in these platforms, companies still hesitating will lose to competitors that are carving out a culture of continuous experimentation, personalized CX, and rapid go-to-market strategies supported by voice-of-the-customer (VoC) data.

Why financial brands must understand real-time customer sentiment

It’s vital to deeply understand your consumers’ feelings about your bank, credit union, tax service, or other financial institution. According to Forbes, financial brands with stellar customer experiences bring in 5.7 times more revenue than their competitors. 

Want to be the brand bringing more money? Keep your fingers on the pulse of what people want from your brand. 

The modern customer lifecycle relies heavily on digital experiences, including interactions with a brand through online reviews, star ratings, surveys, feedback, social media, and more. To make these intelligent, strategic actions a reality for everyone walking through your doors, financial brands must rely on BI and text sentiment analysis to hone in on customer expectations and proactively anticipate issues before they become detrimental to revenue.

What is customer sentiment analysis?

Customer sentiment analysis, paired with AI-powered Natural Language Processing (NLP) capabilities, provides a holistic and data-backed report of what consumers think and feel about your brand in real-time. Complex algorithms determine the emotional sentiment of text, including online reviews, user feedback, social media comments, and Google ratings.

A BI and sentiment analysis tool is essential for brands to cut through the clutter. By leveraging analytics,  identify issues based on customer service, location, products, new services, wait times, and anything else related to CX.

It also simplifies monitoring customer feedback and significant sentiment trends. Whether analyzing your new products’ success or discovering positive business changes, sentiment analysis software can help you implement the right changes based on intuitive data and actionable analytics.

5 ways your text & sentiment analysis can level up your customer experience strategies

1. Speed up technology adoption by zeroing in on consumer sentiment

Understanding changes in consumer sentiment gives financial brands a competitive edge in aligning CX. Over time, brands can gain insight into current and past business strategies, initiatives, or test marketing. It’s also vital in preventing PR crises.

Research in McKinsey’s Global Survey shows that companies accelerated the adoption of digital technologies after investing in customer sentiment analysis — sometimes by several years.

As brands race to meet heightened omnichannel expectations, they must understand how any changes impact CX. Rather than wait months, or even years, to measure the positive, negative, or neutral effects, many financial institutions report being able to make data-backed decisions in weeks, if not days.

2. Identify customer service issues FAST!

When your branch’s customers give negative feedback, issues must be resolved ASAP. Before visiting a new financial institution, 55% of consumers use Google to read online customer reviews. Furthermore, after reading negative online reviews, four of five consumers have changed their minds about a recommended purchase.

This could have a massive impact on a brand.

Without acting quickly, it can lead to severe consequences, including a substantial decrease in revenue and loss of customers. With a text and sentiment analysis tool, brands can filter positive, negative, and neutral customer feedback based on urgency to efficiently identify and resolve problems before it becomes bigger.

3. Compare individual branch locations across your enterprise

Not every bank or credit union location faces the same challenges, even under the same brand umbrella. As nearly all are multi-location organizations, they deal with the challenge of upholding a positive brand reputation from the corporate headquarters down to an individual location — and even ATMs.

With complete visibility at every level, sentiment analysis platforms quickly identify location-based issues by deciphering recurring trends and pain points. With robust BI and VoC data, gather a treasure trove of insights needed to develop a detailed improvement strategy.

Strengthen strategies further with location comparison reports. Here, brands can isolate data metrics to identify which branches are doing well and which need improvement. Reports are also fantastic for boosting transparency as they are easily shareable to whomever in the organization should have equal insights.

In each report, view how customers perceive a branch, region, or entire enterprise regarding factors including:

• Average customer sentiment
• Trending positive, negative, and neutral keywords
• Brand name mentions
• Review ratings

These metrics provide benchmarks and insights on which areas to take action locally, regionally, nationally, or globally.

4. Get insight into product launches

Whenever a finance brand releases a new tech product or service, its success can be measured by seeing how it’s performing with its customer base. Do customers in a test market love the new mobile app enough to launch it nationwide? Or is it still too glitchy for a wider release? Use customer sentiment analysis to make the wisest choices.

Regardless of the response, tracking consumer sentiment around new products, services, or experiences will help brands monitor the success of new initiatives through organic customer feedback. Backed by data, implement agile strategies in no time.

5. Improve your overall customer experience

Happy customers increase brand awareness, acquisition, and retention. Brands will get countless monthly reviews per location when you’re a brand with dozens, hundreds, or thousands of sites. Each one contains invaluable feedback. Don’t let one go to waste with a strong customer sentiment platform.

Pulse helps financial brands make confident business decisions

Unlike other sentiment analysis tools, Pulse, Chatmeter’s text and sentiment analysis tool, breaks down separate components of the overall text to analyze sentiment around each topic. At 88% accuracy, Pulse beats other major NLP models such as Google and Amazon. With just a few clicks, Pulse provides a deep CX breakdown into your customer experience so that any financial brand can source any problem quickly.

The example below highlights how Pulse intuitively identifies and assigns two different sentiments from a single review. Although the pizza is good, the service is really slow. Therefore the brand doesn’t have a problem with its menu. It’s an issue related to training or processes.

Most review sentiment tools assign sentiment to the review as a whole, similar to the star ratings on online reviews. However, not all star ratings perfectly reflect what the review itself actually says. After all, human language is incredibly layered and nuanced.

Explore the Interactive Pulse Demo now and see how our groundbreaking sentiment analysis engine can transform your financial brand.