Transcription:
The Major Components of Reputation Management

Intro: When you've been searching for the right insight, advice and information on financial marketing, you know where to go? The Speakeasy, the exclusive source for financial marketing insights with a shot of human, starring Kelly Hellickson and Hilary Reed from EmpowerFi, strategy-infused data-driven marketing solutions for financial institutions nationwide.

And on this episode, Kelly Hellickson talks about the major components of reputation management with Matt Murray, the CEO and founder of Vermont-based company, Widewail, and Riley Dickie, who handles business development and partnerships at Widewail. Now, here's your host, Kelly Hellickson.

Kelly Hellickson: Hi guys, Matt and Riley with Widewail. How are you guys?

Matt Murray: Doing great, Kelly. Thanks for having us.

Riley Dickie: Doing great.

Kelly Hellickson: This is your second time, so welcome back to The Speakeasy. And I know last time we discussed reputation management. We talked about what it is, what it does and how it could be powerful for folks in our landscape.

So today, I really just want to talk about how EmpowerFi powered by Widewail can help. Break it down for our listeners. So let's just pretend that our audience is totally starting from scratch with no idea of what makes up like a complete reputation management strategy, and then let's break down the components. So, Matt, what would you say the major components of reputation management are?

Matt Murray: Yeah, sure. This is great. So with almost every single one of our clients, we start by taking stock of where they are today. Basic things like lifetime scores and volumes of reviews across the most important review sites. We also like to think of the digital engagement broadly as part of your reputation, so what are you doing in socials to engage with folks who are commenting on maybe some of your assets.

And we set a baseline and say, "Okay. Well, here's where you are today. Here's where you are kind of against your local competitors. And here's a strategy that you could put in place to make improvements at each stage."

We start with digital engagement in most cases. And what I mean by that is let's turn on our monitoring tools and start to listen, right? What are people saying about you on social? How many reviews are you really getting monthly? What is the quality of those reviews? And operationally for the branch or branches, you want to have a good sort of response and escalation process. So let's get kind of fit as it comes to digital engagement. Get a process in place to manage customer feedback.

And then, once we have a sense of what's happening around a branch, we've got good processes in place to engage with members digitally, we want to create more engagement.

Kelly Hellickson: It's a popularity contest as Riley always tells me, right?

Riley Dickie: That's right.

Matt Murray: Yeah. So in most cases, especially when we evaluate credit unions, we see scores that are depressed, because we're not actively asking our happy members to leave feedback. And we see kind of social properties that are devoid of the social side of social media, right? Like we're not actually talking back to anybody. So we get it in place, right? And then we start soliciting for that type of digital engagement, leaning on the process we've already installed to make sure that every single member is recognized and all feedback is responded to.

Kelly Hellickson: That's great. So it's safe to say that we start out with kind of an audit, if you will, of what they have from tool standpoint right now for reviews and software, and then we give them a grade, so to speak, and then we help them not only manage, respond, but also invite and solicit reviews positively. And then we get that conversation rolling, but then we also further and continue that communication and talk and engage with them back and forth.

Matt Murray: Yeah, that's right. And phase one, if we're being really honest, phase one can be tough because we take a hard look and say, "Hey, things maybe aren't as good as they should be," because everybody's proud of where they work and the service that they provide their members, but sometimes that just doesn't show online.

Kelly Hellickson: And that's something that really strikes a chord with our landscape in particular, because it's a movement, right? And it truly is about people helping people. So you're right. It does hit home when those Google My Business star ratings are not where we want them to be. And I really liked the audit process. I appreciate it, Riley, what you did for our folks and giving them a scope and a snapshot of where they're at right now.

So let's break it down. Okay, Riley. Let's talk about a member, Kelly and Brad walk into ABC Credit Union to apply for a loan, everything goes great. Explain how that post-experience review process could work, should work. And then furthermore, we'll talk about the tech stack that is EmpowerFi powered by Widewail.

Riley Dickie: Yeah. Thanks, Kel. So you and Brad, you're walking into ABC Credit Union and you have that great experience, just like members do 99% of the time, regardless of the credit union that they are engaging with. You just hit the nail on the head. Credit unions are member first. It's about people helping people. And majority of the time, that's the reaction that member's experience and have as well.

Wherever that interaction is held within the data, it could be in your core, it could be in the loan origination system, a data warehouse. Or it could simply be in some native-built tech stack that we know certain credit unions know and love. What we can do is we're simply autotriggering that invitation via SMS, completely personalized, and the first name of the member, the first name of that loan officer, the branch name and location. And what this does is it simply continues that conversation, moves it post-transaction to a personalized means of interaction, this time via text.

So imagine Kel, you and Brad, as soon as you leave ABC Credit Union, you've got that new loan for that project or whatever you're using it for.

Kelly Hellickson: The bathroom project, Riley. It's a real thing.

Riley Dickie: For Brad, but your bathroom project.

Kelly Hellickson: Not for Brad. Brad's living the American dream, all right?

Riley Dickie: So you get that text and it just simply says, "Hey, Kelly. This is Riley from ABC Credit Union down on Madison Avenue. We're so happy to have you as members. We're so glad we could get you your loan. Do you mind giving us your feedback? Do you mind leaving us a review?" And that text comes from a real ten-digit number. It is coming in that personalized fashion, representing the brand and the language of ABC Credit Union.

And then it is a very simple, seamless process for our members. It's a couple of clicks. It's a couple seconds and you are right there on the GMB page leaving a review or on the Facebook page leaving a review. Or it's simply can go wherever ABC Credit Union wants. Let's say they want this certain loan product on Bankrate or Credit Karma or NerdWallet. Great. That's their strategy, their initiative. Let's help there too. Because at the end of the day, what reputation management is about is taking the voice of the customer, that word of web that we've continued to talk about and it's moving it online, so that we can play that popularity contest that is the internet here today.

Kelly Hellickson: Yeah. And I think it's fantastic. So a couple things to note for our listeners in the audiences, like it's come up a lot in past conversations, well that SMS, do they have to opt in first? And do you have any info on that, Riley, for our listeners?

Riley Dickie: Great question. So the answer is that this is an SMS text or an engagement post-interaction. And why this is huge is because in this case, ABC Credit Union, but it could be any credit union across, the landscape, you're not soliciting a sale. You're not soliciting a marketing offer. What you're doing is you're just continuing to interact and engage and communicate with your members again post-transaction.

And that is why there're, one, sometimes some compliance or security curiosity, because we know that they always come up. It is completely within the rules and the regulations and the guidelines again, because it's just communication. And then the second one is because it is post- transaction, your members, so in this case of the example, Kelly and Brad, they know Riley is a loan officer from ABC Credit Union. They have interacted with him. No different than Matt, the call center representative or Bill, the bank teller. Those are post-interactions and all we're doing is moving it from in-person or on the phone to SMS text.

Kelly Hellickson: And then online. Yeah. So that's fantastic. And I think that, hopefully, we set ourselves up for success when we talk about, again, reputation management, engage, invite, engage plus social media, we've got it all covered. But talk a little bit now, Riley, if you will, about that tech stack and what that could look like.

Riley Dickie: Every credit union across, we'll say, this country has unique tech stack in some way shape or form. And what's the most important part of it is what's consistent. You know your members, you know how you've interacted with them and you know the products that they have. And it's that's first name, last name, product and the representatives of your credit union that they've engaged with that are most important.

So how we take that data and move it seamlessly through EmpowerFi powered by Widewail is all part of the Widewail system that we make easy for the credit union. Everybody gets pitched products that it's going to take more time, more energy. And what Widewail and EmpowerFi want to do is simply add that bandwidth back into your system. So we actually become an extension of your team. We become an extension of your voice and make these reviews and the generation and the management and response of them, take that off your plate, let's the technology and let professional writers using that fundamental proprietary tech become an extension of your team so that you can continue to tackle the other initiatives, knowing how important reputation management is and knowing and feeling comfortable that you've let the experts take care of that online engagement life cycle.

Kelly Hellickson: Absolutely. So that's fantastic. And I want to capitalize on something and have Matt, can you talk to us about-- Riley said proprietary and in the last conversation Riley and I had, with one of our credit union clients, you know, there was the question that came up. She was wondering, well, who owns Widewail? How does this software-- is it proprietary? What are the licensing guidelines?

Matt Murray: Yeah, of course. So, I'm the founder and CEO. We built the product before we went live. The foundation of it as a monitoring platform so that we can see what's happening around the branch. We connect to the sites. I think we connect to Google and Facebook for instance via an API. So our system is talking directly to those networks and monitoring your properties, be at your Google My Business page or your Facebook page.

It is proprietary and that we are a private company. We don't leverage any third-party software. We purpose built our platform just for this. You can find and sort of leverage some other software that feels like it might do something similar, but we decided, "You know what? To do this right, we've got to build it ourselves from the ground up."

Kelly Hellickson: That's awesome. That's fantastic. We're really excited about that. And I guess in your opinion, Matt, engagement management, is that limited to review sites? Or talk to us about the channels and some of the strategies from those channels that our folks can benefit from.

Matt Murray: I mentioned when we started the business, I think, in our early conversations, Kelly, I was telling you how we started by building tech-enabled managed service. So, we put hands on keyboards and respond to members. That's a task that is very difficult for a brick and mortar business of any type to tackle because that expense doesn't fit well in a P&L, right? You've got the head count costs, you've got technology costs.

We created a scalable, product where our team can be, as Riley said, an extension of your voice. With that as a foundation, we talk about sort of the tenets of reputation management, being volume, frequency, quality, and response. We've tackled the hardest part. It's really difficult to do what we do respond to so many different members every single day with custom comments.

Kelly Hellickson: Oh, yeah. Just imagine in your personal life how many text messages you're responding to on a daily basis, then you migrate that to transactions in a credit union on a daily basis, both in-person and web and digitally-speaking, right?

Matt Murray: Totally. The thing that I think most people aren't fully aware of today when it comes to online engagement is, you're very active getting in the conversation, whether it's responding to Google reviews or Facebook recommendations or commenting back to happy members under posts on your Facebook page. That activity itself improves the visibility of the branch.

It is fundamentally part of SEO. In fact, internally, we talk about this process as conversational SEO. When you talk about how happy you are to secure the loan to remodel your bathroom, those are keywords, right, that are in turn indexed by folks like Google. So getting more of that product-specific conversation from your members onto these digital properties is nothing but good news in terms of member growth.

Kelly Hellickson: Well, you guys, as I would say to Brad, a happy wife equals a happy life. So we all know we can apply that in our personal and professional lives. And a happy member is what all of us want, a happy customer. So banks and credit unions, reputation management is here and it's hot. So guys, I thank you for being on the show.

Matt Murray: Thank you, Kelly.

Riley Dickie: Thank you so much.

Intro: And thanks for joining us. And to connect with Hilary or Kelly to simplify your credit union marketing needs with EmpowerFi's full service marketing and design support, please visit empowerfi.org. You can also email info@empowerfi.org for more information.

This is The Speakeasy financial marketing podcast. Thanks for listening.