South Africa's Nedbank is using social media analytics tools to win customers from rival banks by monitoring their chatter on popular forums such as Twitter and Facebook.
Nedbank partnered with IBM and local supplier Olrac spSolutions to develop a predictive modeling system that integrates social media analytics into the bank's systems.
Whereas before the bank used a number of tools and external resources to mine social media for customer feedback purposes, the marketing team now have access to a visual dashboard of social chatter reflecting customer preferences, sentiment and satisfaction that can be used to craft and deliver more effective sales promotions and customer messages.
Eugene Liebenberg, head of retail business intelligence solution science at Nedbank, says the bank has also been successful in setting up discussions with customers from rival banks and persuading them to move their accounts.
Says Liebenberg: "Because we are tracking out competitors, we can target some of their customers and switch them across."
He says the bank has set up a 'social call centre' to handle customer contact across public fora and to identify and address problems in near real-time.
The next stage, he says, will be to use the technology to actively track the hobbies and likes of clients and gather a more rounded 360 degree view of individual customer lifestyles.
"The challenge for us after that is to ask: how do we make that data available to our front-end staff for use in a valuable conversation?" says Liebenberg. "Not being intrusive in any way, but to use...that sales talk or sales call to better effect."