A couple of months ago we discussed a study from MyPrivateBanking Research which found that global banking representation in social media was poor.  Most of the world’s leading banks either had an ad-hoc social approach or no strategy at all.

There are no hard and fast rules in engagement, but for the banking industry, with millions of customers, one thing is certain, social media is vital for managing relationships and reputations. Your customers are ready – are you?

Apparently not – especially when it comes to dealing with customer complaints.

SAS recently hosted a conference for the industry on social media for strategic marketing.  While delegates agreed that online was more important for customer service than telephones or in-branch, few responded to complaints made on the web.  The message from the SAS event was banks ‘need to develop integrated strategies not only to monitor social media but also empower themselves to react to it’.

So, we’ve had a quick look at some of the consumer complaints and issues in the UK mortgage discussion.   Our system picked up the following examples for Santander, Halifax, Nationwide and HSBC – all used for illustration.

On Santander …
‘Has anyone had delays/ problems with santander mortgages? i have recently heard of another friend who’s purchase became held up by santander…’ (Forum reply on MoneySavingExpert.com 28/11)

On Halifax …
‘Halifax is blasted for mortgage rate hikes: Britain’s biggest mortgage lender has been branded …’ (Tweet by Wesner Michel 26/11)

On HSBC …
‘Problem 1: HSBC. We opted to apply for a HSBC 2 year fixed rate mortgage because the rate was the best we could find. This was last Wednesday, and I’m already getting the jitters. Although someone called on Thursday “to create a profile” for me, and promised someone would call on Friday morning, they didn’t.’ (Forum reply on MoneySavingExpert.com 29/11)

On Nationwide …
‘Nationwide waited till my property increased in value to obtain the debt. I had to remortgage the property thankfully not with Nationwide…’

This took five minutes by drilling down to the topic cloud for negative sentiment for each lender and it would only take a minute for brands to use our workflow functionality to respond to online conversations flagged for action by alerts or analysis.  Seemples.