Going Digital - Part Four

Part 4: Looking back to move forward

Going through the process of revamping our website and launching our social media pages taught us a lot about the best practices and common mistakes businesses often encounter when undergoing a digital transformation. But it also gave us an opportunity see ourselves, as an organisation and the products and services we offer in a different way.

Shifting your approach from the traditional one-way, broadcasting style of communication to a more engaging, two-way style of communicating, forces you to place more emphasis on the messages your customers want or need to know and less emphasis on what you want to say. In shifting our outlook in this way changed the way we saw our messages and ourselves. We found that there was a lot more value that we could add to these conversations beyond promotional content. As an authority in the financial services industry with more than 181 years of experience we were actually in a good position to create content that would educate our customers on vital topics from retirement planning, to investing or purchasing a new home and we’ve since been using our websites and social media pages to share this kind of content.

We’ve also gotten to know our customers a lot better through our web and social media pages which give us the opportunity to speak but also to listen. This deeper understanding has helped us to provide them with faster, more efficient and more responsive service and more personalised information.

Our digital tools have also given us enhanced abilities to measure the effectiveness and impact of our communications. Email engagement metrics like opens, click throughs and unsubscribes and their social media counterparts such as shares, comments and retweets tell us a lot about what we’re doing right and what we might want to change.

For the future, we intend to keep along this path of using our platforms to enhance the lives, knowledge and banking experience of our customers and to connect with other groups and individuals who are invested in making our societies stronger and more successful. We also intend to continue building then digital capabilities of our teams so that they can continue to push our organisation further into the 21st century.

We’ve learned a lot and come a long way as an organisation when it comes to our digital communications. If you’re looking to invest or even refresh your own digital transformation, here a few tips I can share from the lessons we have learned ourselves:

1. Identify goals and objectives: Remember our first ad-hoc attempt at Facebook? We learned early on that setting clear goals and objectives for the media you want to use makes a clear difference in the outcome of your efforts.
2. Create a strategy and a comprehensive social media policy: You would be surprised to know how many organisations do not these in place. But developing our digital strategy and social media policy proved to be the secret sauce in building our online presence. It takes time and resources but it’s 100% worth it!
3. Provide valuable content: We shifted our entire outlook on the content we produced as a team. Our content is now focussed on educating our customers and on adding value to their lives.
4. The only way is two-way: Digital communication is all about engagement, which means you have to be open to feedback and genuinely interested in engaging your online community in conversation.
5. Remember there’s always room for improvement: Your digital transformation is never really done. With new technologies emerging every day, change is the only constant when it comes to digital communications!

That’s it! If you’ve gone through this process at your own organisation or if you’re about to try, I’d love to hear your ideas, thoughts and experiences.