Social Listening to Revitalize a Digital First Bank's Customer Experience

The Challenge:

A leading digital bank sought to improve customer experience in a bid to position itself as a trusted financial “partner,” moving beyond the traditional “provider” role. Their goal was to enhance brand perception and loyalty by addressing pain points in the customer journey, with a focus on delivering "Refreshingly Pleasant" experiences.

The Approach:

By flipping the question around as "What unpleasant experiences do people encounter that the bank can transform into "Refreshingly Pleasant" encounters?", first identified three potential opportunity areas:

1. Existing Customers: Identify pain points for improved customer experience.

2. Incremental Customers: Leverage competitor insights to differentiate and attract new customers.

3. Untapped Customers: Discern unmet financial struggles to position for long-term partnerships with new customers

   

   Figure 1: Addressable Market

Next, I used a multi-topic Social Listening exercise to explore and validate the three potential opportunity areas. Monitors were strategically set up using keywords for the brand, competitors ,category and other financial terms to capture online conversations centered on people's experiences with banking providers and financial struggles across social media platforms, blogs, forums, and review sites. 

Figure 2: Monitor Setup

These insights were then mapped onto the consumer journey with the bank to pinpoint areas requiring intervention  to make them “refreshingly pleasant”.

Figure 3: Consumer's Banking Journey

The Insight:

The analysis revealed that the most significant pain point for customers was a persistent information gap. Whether it involved untimely updates about card declines, unclear policies around international card usage, unexpected account closures, or difficulty identifying the right credit card product (a running theme in the US market!), customers consistently reported a lack of transparency and proactive communication.

Competitive benchmarking further highlighted that many banks exacerbate this frustration by relying heavily on chatbots, which often lack the language proficiency and contextual understanding needed to resolve complex issues. This reliance on impersonal, inadequate support channels creates a clear opportunity for the client to differentiate itself by delivering a more "pleasant" and transparent, human-centered customer experience.

Figure 4: Verbatim Mentions

The Outcome:

The findings significantly deepened the client’s understanding of the consumer needs and help them elevate their position to a “financial partner” in a competitive financial landscape. With the help of social listening, the client was able to achieve the following:

1. Well defined problem areas: Pain points mapped onto the consumer journey, enabled the client to target specific areas of its operations for improvement.

2. Competitive Differentiation: Competitive benchmarking revealed clear opportunities for differentiation

3. Heightened Credibility: Direct redressal of consumer needs reinforced credibility, establishing the client as the preferred banking partner

4. Long term Partner: Positioned as a long-term financial partner by addressing current and future financial struggles.

By aligning the approach with the client's vision we were able to help the client not only address immediate consumer needs but also set the stage for sustained growth in an evolving financial landscape.

Done at TBWA\Singapore