Blog Highlights:
- Many financial services customers want the option of contacting their financial institutions by phone — especially when discussing complex or sensitive financial matters.
- Call tracking software not only raises the bar for your sales and marketing ROI, it gives you the hard numbers you need to prove your success and revenue generation.
- Data generated through call tracking software can deliver insights related to customer sentiments, emerging pain points and product needs, keyword research, and more.
Even with the increased adoption of mobile banking, digital assistants, and virtual chatbots, many financial services customers still like contacting their financial institutions by phone. This need for direct phone support is even greater for more complex or sensitive financial matters. Many consumers are still uncomfortable discussing fraudulent charges and other sensitive financial matters with an online chatbot.
Although digital, automated services still have an important role in the larger customer experience, these digital solutions are just part of the regular communication customers want — and expect — from their financial institutions.
At the same time, the rise of online-only financial services has increased competition for many traditional financial companies. This competition has created even more urgency around the need to offer timely communications and provide excellent customer service. Along with the challenges around new customer acquisition, and the cost of marketing in a saturated vertical, this competition has made it all the more important for marketing departments to prove ROI for their efforts.
Digital Banking Report research shows that 88% of pioneering digital disruptors don’t just rely on software-driven innovation to separate their business from the pack. They also lean on KPI measurement to evaluate their success, prove their ROI, and push their performance even higher.
Call tracking software can fulfill all of these areas of need, providing an efficient, platform-based sales and marketing tool that raises the bar for your ROI while giving you the hard numbers you need to prove your success. Here’s a look at the benefits of integrating such software to bolster your financial services company’s sales and marketing efforts.
The biggest marketing challenges financial services businesses face
As financial services businesses work to acquire new customers and retain their existing clients, they’re subject to many of the same marketing challenges businesses face in other verticals. But finance-specific challenges that complicate these marketing efforts often include:
- Increased customer choice: Customers have more options than ever, which means the marketing pitch offered by businesses needs to be stronger in turn. As more options lead to less patience, marketing and sales strategies must be organized and efficiently run to engage customers quickly with relevant messaging.
- Rising demand for personalized financial services and products: From flex loans to credit counseling to personalized rates on financial products, customers are looking for financial services companies to cater to their specific needs.
- Demand for innovative financial technology: Money management, tax, accounting, and other software solutions are in high demand among financial services customers. Marketing strategies must therefore highlight these innovations to attract eager consumers.
- Managing customer inquiries during peak periods: During periods of volatility, such as the COVID-19 pandemic and economic recessions, demand for new products or service flexibility increases. This often translates to an increase in communication with financial services businesses.
- Understanding the ROI of specific marketing channels: Marketing attribution is key to evaluating your full customer journey. Gaps in this customer journey data can create blind spots that hold you back from measuring and demonstrating your marketing ROI.
How call tracking’s benefits address these challenges
Call tracking software offers value to businesses across every vertical. But these benefits are even more pronounced for financial services businesses, which can use this platform-based solution to address specific pain points hampering their marketing efforts.
These benefits include:
- Organizing and tracking leads through lead management software: From online applications and forms to inbound phone calls, financial services businesses receive leads from many different sources. A lead management solution like Lead Center helps centralize these leads and can even categorize them based on the type of service each lead is seeking. A company offering in-house wealth management and financial counseling services, for example, can route leads to relevant sales agents.
- Qualifying leads to prioritize responses and align messaging with pain points: With customers enjoying more options than ever, your marketing needs to be quick, concise, and relevant to the customers’ pain points. The lead qualification tools offered through a call tracking solution can help you gather important data to identify your best leads and target them through the most relevant messaging possible.
- Coordinating outreach to minimize response times: Fast response times are correlated with higher conversion rates. With financial services clients enjoying expanded options, the quickest engagement can put your business in pole position.
- Leveraging analytics to better understand customers’ needs and wants: Call tracking software can help you evaluate the needs of your clients based on their conversation content. Performance analytics can show you what types of pain points are driving prospects to your business, as well as what types of messaging produce conversions for your business.
- Segmenting audiences to provide more relevant marketing engagement: If your business offers a wide range of services — or if your customers come to your business with several pain points — segmentation can help you deliver messaging that is relevant to those areas of interest. This segmentation is especially important in the financial services industry, where the audience is multigenerational and holds a wide range of interests and priorities.
Leveraging call tracking to increase your sales and marketing ROI
Inbound calls provide direct engagement with customers that can lead to valuable insights in addition to serving as an effective channel for qualifying leads and converting new customers. But when sales agents are focused on closing the deal, they often don’t have the resources they need to track data points and other useful insights from those calls.
Data-driven tools available through call tracking software, as well as functionality such as call recording, make it easier to analyze call content on a granular level to better understand your customer experience — including how you might improve it. This can lead to more effective sales and marketing messaging.
At the same time, marketing attribution can help you contextualize your performance in new ways based on the KPIs you use to evaluate your marketing success. With the right attribution model, you can adjust your marketing mix and refine your strategy to push your ROI higher than ever before.
More than marketing: Using call tracking to improve your customer experience
The data available through call tracking and related software can deliver benefits that ripple throughout your organization, providing insights that range from customer sentiment data to emerging pain points and product needs, new keywords, and more.
Powering up call tracking software with Conversation Intelligence, will help your team track every call, automatically transcribe those calls, then utilize AI in order to analyze them - all while staying PCI compliant. For example, financial services businesses can acquire a better understanding of the specific needs faced by current and potential customers. This information can then be used to develop new financial products and services that deliver timely value to those customers.
As customers’ needs evolve over time, these shifting priorities will be reflected in the data. In turn, organizations can use this to stay nimble in providing responsive services. This valuable data also offers a path to sustainable business operations: Experts view customer intelligence as the most important predictor of revenue growth and profitability, according to PwC.
Meanwhile, this data can be used to create educational modules and other types of content that improve your customers’ financial literacy and wellness while providing a new way to grow your business through community outreach.
A financial future worth your investment
As the financial services industry evolves through digital transformation, customers are in the driver’s seat, pushing this innovation forward. Businesses that are determined to build a strong, sustainable future need to invest in the solutions that their customers are seeking. They must create new data channels to expand their customer intelligence and inform a more profitable marketing strategy.
See how CallRail can benefit your financial services company — sign up for a 14-day free trial.
