Here are six best practices firms can follow to ensure communications are strategic, impactful, and meaningful to customers.
1. Create an Integrated Strategy
Branding and messaging matter immensely for financial services firms. All communications must be consistent. However, this can be quite a challenge when dealing with multiple channels of communication. The only way firms can achieve this goal is to develop and implement an integrated marketing strategy.
The marketing strategy focuses on creating a unified voice across all channels. It makes keeping the firm’s messaging and brand story a strong priority with all team members. Additionally, integrated marketing ensures that whether customers connect with a firm on a mobile device or a desktop, their experience has the same quality.
Integrated marketing can also save a firm time and money. Creative team members can create one piece of content and repurpose it across multiple channels. Their press release can become social media snippets, a blog post, and an email to customers. This cuts down on the number of assets that need to be created. Instead of each team making its own materials, the team can share what others have created.
However, before firms start making and sharing assets or sending out marketing materials, they must take the time to do market research. As a part of this research, firms need to develop buyer personas that can help guide marketing in the future. Though time-consuming, these pre-marketing steps are valuable. They provide insight into what a firm’s customers want and can help shape the strategy going forward.
2. Develop and Follow an Intentional Communication Plan
There is no winging it when it comes to interacting with customers. Firms that try to piecemeal a communication plan wind up sending out disjointed messages that confuses customers. Unfortunately, confused customers tend to go elsewhere for their financial needs. They simply don’t trust a firm that appears disorganized.
To avoid losing customers, it’s essential for firms to take the time upfront to strategize and outline the customer communication plan. This critical step ensures that every message is strategic, intentional and will be meaningful to customers.
3. Train Your Team on the Plan and Communication Best Practices
Firms must take the time to train every member of the team on best practices in communication and ensure the whole staff understands the new plan and helps implement it.
This training allows customers to receive the same level of professionalism, reliability and consistency no matter who they interact with. As a part of this team education, firms should make it a point to convey up-to-date information on how to use each communication channel. It’s important for firms to know current best practices for each platform and understand how to use them effectively. Then, whether a customer reaches out on a social platform, sends an email, or picks up the phone and calls, the firm is ready to deliver the correct, consistent response.
4. Leverage a Single Digital Asset Repository
In order to implement the communication plan, everyone on the team who interacts with customers needs to know how to quickly access up-to-date information. To streamline this process, best practice is to use a single-source platform. Utilizing a golden repository for assets helps to promote efficiency and productivity. Team members won’t waste any time searching through files or wondering which version is the latest.
In addition, having a single digital location for communication materials ensures that team members who work remotely can access what they need.
Technology can help the entire workforce stay connected even if they’re physically apart. A secure single-source platform that can be accessed remotely is essential. This technology ensures that productivity won’t drop for employees who are working from home. Instead, they’ll be able to access everything they need just as if they were in the office.
Providing access to the communication assets isn’t the only benefit of a single repository. It also helps to streamline the collaborative process that has to occur between creators, marketers, and investor relations staff. With a single-source platform, collaboration can happen in real-time, and documents can get approved quickly. This can help eliminate bottlenecks in the communication department and help everyone work more efficiently.
5. Security of All Customer Communications Remains a Top Priority
The financial services industry is a prime target for cyberattacks, and experts predict attacks are going to continue in the future. Customers trust their financial firms with a plethora of personal data, including social security numbers, account numbers, and more. If this information falls into the wrong hands, identity theft and other crimes can occur.
Security extends to customer communication as well. Whether a firm is sending personalized information to a single customer or broadly sharing a public message, security must be a top priority.
In addition, be certain any company the firm chooses to partner with for communications has a robust security plan including, encryption, ISO/IEC 27001 certification and SOC compliance.
6. Embrace an Omnichannel Approach
Financial services firms serve customers across a variety of demographics. Each person interacting with a firm has individual preferences when it comes to communication. Some want to interact with an app and prefer to use text messaging or email as opposed to talking on the phone. Others are leery of discussing their finances through digital means and prefer physical copies of information to be mailed out. Many customers fall somewhere in between these two extremes. These customers want to communicate through digital methods for some situations but prefer physical copies or in-person contact for others.
To meet the needs and preferences of each customer, firms must accept the fact that there isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution. What works for one customer is not going to work for everyone. This means an omnichannel experience is necessary.
With an omnichannel communication system in place, team members can easily track all communication with clients. This means no matter how the contact is made, team members can easily access the entire conversation and have the information needed to quickly and accurately respond. Messages are less likely to fall through the cracks with a system that can handle multiple types of communication.
Conclusion
Having a communication plan and strategy is integral for firms to help build trust with their customers. Toppan Merrill offers solutions that make communication simple and can help firms overcome the communication problems that they’re facing. Firms can use Toppan Merrill Connect™ to create, manage, produce, and distribute their content in a centralized location. The powerful technology-driven solution allows firms to embrace an omnichannel experience. The platform has the capacity to handle all of a firm’s data in one spot, helping to streamline the marketing process.
This single repository makes it simple to keep documents organized. It’s easy for team members to find what they’re looking for when they only have one place to look. By keeping everything in a single spot, firms can improve productivity and eliminate communication-related bottlenecks. Additionally, the single-source platform ensures that only the most up-to-date version of any given asset is being used.
To learn more customer communication best practices, download our whitepaper, Communication Best Practices for Financial Services Firms.
