Employee Advocacy in Finance
Digital technologies have fundamentally changed the way consumers live and work, making a seamless customer experience across various lines of business functions a top priority for many banks.
Financial services firms have been operating with a deep focus on the end-to-end customer experience and digitizing their business. In fact, almost every financial service product can now be provided digitally and more efficiently as per the customers’ needs.
Firms are competing mainly on price—there is limited product or service differentiation. However, to win in this new competitive landscape, institutions must devise new strategies and tools to effectively compete against new players.
Financial services companies face the same consumer demands as other industries. In a study conducted by Edelman, 87 percent of respondents said they want more meaningful relationships with brands, including transparent communication, responsiveness and genuine conviction.
This expectation extends to their money managers, advisors and banks, as well as the actual channels of communication. Financial institutions need to expand the ways which they communicate with clients – online and offline – to stay relevant.
So how can financial services companies differentiate themselves and offer a world-class client experience? The answer lies in empowering their employees to tell the brand story. This is where employee advocacy can play a huge role.
Why is Employee Advocacy Important?
When consumers need to understand something, they don’t turn to advertising for answers. They go to friends, colleagues, and family, whom they trust more. Why not equip employees with messaging that’s going to elevate your brand and support your business growth?
As discussed in Altimeter’s report on social media employee advocacy, companies need to move beyond viewing social media as a tool for marketers and empower their employees to help achieve their key business objectives.
This means focusing less on “growing your social media audience” or “increasing your reach”, and more on looking internally and across departments to support a broader digital vision.
There are several factors that are driving the adoption of employee advocacy programs at financial services companies:
- Employees are the brand, they are the most important asset and are not yet leveraged to be an authentic voice of the company on social
- Dwindling organic reach of paid media is a substantial concern for organizations
- Connecting employees to content and enabling them to create and share helps drive employee engagement
- Employee communication and advocacy solutions make it easy for employees to access curated content that keeps them informed, and enables them to safely share pre-approved content on their external social networks
The concept of empowering employees to share company content with their personal social networks has seen a significant upward trend in the past few years.
Interest in employee advocacy has grown 191% since 2013, with 45% affirms naming it a top external objective. Nearly 31% of all high-growth firms now have a formal employee advocacy program in place.
To Succeed, You Need to Engage Your Employees
Employees hold the key to building trust with your clients, and keeping employees engaged and informed is the path to client retention and business development.
A report from AON Hewitt highlights that the financial implications of engaged workforce, and states that a 5% increase in employee engagement is linked to 3% increase in revenue growth.
While providing a seamless customer experience is becoming increasingly challenging for many banks, ensuring that employees are aligned and enabled to meet the customer demands is pivotal to competitive advantage.
Internal Alignment is Critical
Gaps in internal infrastructure and collaboration challenges are typically the biggest roadblocks to alignment, as many banks struggle with legacy and siloed infrastructure. The recent generational shift in the workforce has brought about a different set of demands and expectations from work.
If you asked every advisor what your company vision is – would they all give similar answers? Would employees be able to confidently identify what you stand for and where your organization is headed? How are they communicating that vision to clients?
Research has shown that only 40% of the workforce can identify their company’s goals, strategies, and tactics.
With so many communication channels, it can be difficult to get everyone on the same page – especially when we consider front-line agents who may not have the same work experience as head office employees.
Obsolete Tools Are Holding You Back (and Costing You Money)
Between outdated enterprise software, intranets, and email, it’s no wonder the vision gets lost. Employees don’t know where to receive information, they don’t know what current initiatives are running, and they don’t know what they’re allowed to share externally with friends and family.
But the problem isn’t corporate messaging – it’s how corporate content is disseminated.
Think of it this way: the current consumer app experience is visual, mobile, and social. Your employees are accustomed to receiving information this way outside of work. Why should corporate content be any different?
If employee needs and expectations aren’t considered, it’s a perfect setup for widespread disengagement and poor client experience.
So what’s the cost of this? One disengaged employee costs your company an average of $3,500 for every $10,000 of salary annually. Now imagine this number multiplied by the number of disengaged employees spread across your organization
Deliver the Right Tools and Processes to Your Employees
Employees want to share content, and there’s a clear benefit in doing so. But unfortunately, many financial services firms are invested in processes that are simply ineffective. These processes are either outdated, or they suffer from low response from employees.
Couple that with pressure from executives to increase employee engagement and show ROI from every campaign, and communications managers have quite a challenge. There’s a gap between what employees expect of their employers and what’s being offered to them.
If this gap persists, it perpetuates distrust between employees and the communications department. The more internal campaigns executed that don’t resonate with employees, the wider the gap.
Continuing to invest in inefficient processes suggests to your employees that you’re out of touch with their expectations. What incentive does this give them to stay with your company? And further – what will this employee disengagement cost you in customer satisfaction?
How to Build an Employee Advocacy Program in the Financial Services Industry
1. Your Goal is to Build Trust
A recent report by PricewaterhouseCoopers found that risk management culture, ethics, and trust continue to be the most critical issues in the financial services industry. With competition increasing, financial services companies need to prioritize increasing trust and humanize their brands to get ahead.
Although trust in financial services has been on an incline since 2012, it is still consistently rated the least trustworthy industry across all business sectors globally.
Despite financial services being the least trusted sector among the general population, it is the most trusted as an employer among employees working in the sector. In fact, 80 percent of financial services employees trust their own company to do the right thing, which is an incredible 28 points above the industry in general.
Building trust is imperative among all companies within the financial services industry. Success within the industry, measured by market share, is attained by understanding customers’ needs and challenges and developing meaningful relationships. Building these relationships requires connecting with the customers on digital channels they are active on, but employees are already developing these relationships through day-to-day customer interactions.
2. Empower Employees’ Voices
An effective strategy to enhance these relationships is by empowering employees with the right tools to share stories with their personal social networks. There are a significant number of employees who have a positive view of their employer, but lack the tools and the guidance to become advocates.
3. Highlight Benefits to Employees
Invite employees to be part of a social media advocacy program. Encourage them to share company content on their social networks while highlighting benefits (e.g., building their personal brands, growing their networks, elevating their career opportunities, etc) to them. This helps humanize the brand and give it an authentic voice.
4. Create a Social Media Policy
Establish a social media policy and provide the appropriate social media training to employees. Employee advocacy tools have safeguards to ensure compliance and regulatory guidelines are being met.
5. Start With Your Strongest Advocates
Identify your most influential employees and empower them to be brand champions.
Bonus: How to Navigate Compliance
We understand that regulatory and complaince is a critical part of the financial services industry. However, compliance doesn’t have to be a blocker to employee advocacy. There is a way to meet your compliance requirements while also leveraging employee advocacy.
The video below will give you an inside look at Mercer Group manages compliance in its financial services divisions.
