Some decisions are more important than others. Which bank should I use? Which credit card should I carry? Which trading platform can I trust? These are difficult questions to answer, and even more difficult to answer correctly. The fear of being wrong, and of not trusting your source of information, will often stop consumers in their tracks.
For marketers in financial services, it is critically important that your content, message, and brand are readily available when someone asks one of these questions. For that reason, financial services marketers must invest in refer-a-friend.
Through your customers, you are there when someone is making a switch.
Through your customers, your message, your benefits, and your brand stand out.
Through your customers, a new account with you becomes the obvious choice.
At the same time, building or modernizing your referral program can be daunting. Mobile and even desktop web technologies are changing all the time. How consumers interact digitally with one another is in constant flux. Even something that appears easy, like changing your referral reward, becomes complicated quickly.
This guide outlines the main criteria for evaluating referral technology providers in financial services.
Partnering with a technology provider to power refer-a-friend
Whether you are starting from scratch or replacing an existing referral program, selecting a technology provider to power your refer-a-friend program will save you time, effort, and dollars. The following sections describe the key criteria for selecting your partner.
Experience and strength of vision
When evaluating a technology provider, you are always looking for industry experience. It can also be helpful to look for experience beyond financial services, in adjacent categories like retail or subscription businesses. A richness of ideas from more nimble categories catering to fast-changing consumer habits will help you keep up and stay modern. And since your partnership is likely to be a long-term one, make sure your provider has a vision for the future and thoughts about how referral, advocacy, and customer engagement will evolve. You want to partner with a leader.
Security and compliance
Making sure that your provider takes privacy and security as seriously as you do is paramount. Your vendor will need to demonstrate thorough and complete security, privacy, and operational policies and procedures. ISO27001 certification is a plus, and make sure that regulatory compliance is built into the provider's platform, including for ADA, CAN-SPAM, CCPA, and GDPR.
Integration integrity
Consider your provider's preferred and alternative integration approaches, looking specifically at options for desktop web, mobile web, mobile app, call center, and in-branch integration. While your program may not initially cover all of these important customer touch-points, it is important to make sure that it can when the time comes. Have a coordinated roadmap that allows for flexibility and adaptability.
Customer experience and journey
The customer experience of your referral program should be simple. Ensure the journey has as few steps as possible, is on-brand (with the ability to customize images and URLs to match your business), and includes all the creative necessary for a complete customer experience. As your program grows and matures, you will find it necessary to track and reward every event that matters, such as application, approval, funding, disbursement, and transaction. Customers should have as many sharing channels as possible, as permitted by compliance, including email, SMS, Facebook, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, and a personal share link.
The experience of referred friends must be effective and streamlined. This aspect of refer-a-friend in financial institutions is often overlooked and needs particular attention. Capitalize on "moments of delight." Your provider should be able to provide benchmark data for every step in the referral journey so that you can optimize your actual performance and evolve your program for maximum impact. For example, if referred friends are clicking on links but not converting, your provider should be able to step in and provide guidance on how to increase your conversion rate.
Mobile app flexibility
With the massive increase in customers who primarily or exclusively interact with financial services on mobile apps, making sure that your provider has a strong foundation in powering referral programs in-app is a top priority. Look for a platform provider who offers a range of mobile app capabilities, including API-based integrations, an SDK if your mobile app team prefers it, and even the fast use of app-to-web techniques, which may be appealing in early phases of your relationship.
Analytics and A/B testing
Your provider must offer analytics that are rich and complete, and they need to be readily available in dashboards and via API. In addition, you will likely require some element of custom reporting to reflect your business's unique measurement and analytics infrastructure. It is important to be open-minded about data and results, as refer-a-friend consists of a two-sided funnel (advocates and friends), versus more traditional one-sided marketing channels such as paid media.
A main purpose of rich analytics and benchmarking is to focus activity where it can most improve program performance. A key capability is therefore A/B testing. Look for the ability to test share experience capabilities, as well as offers, journeys, rules and limitations, and marketing placements.
Customer segmentation and targeting
Most brands start their refer-a-friend journey with a one-size-fits-all approach to their program. However, one of the great opportunities of an enterprise-grade approach is the ability to offer different rewards and experiences to different customer segments. For example, your platinum card members should be treated and rewarded differently than your student card holders. Treat referral like a benefit of membership, not a promotion.
When evaluating a referral technology provider, determine whether their technology can simultaneously target different experiences to specific audiences, localize language as necessary, identify interesting segments of advocates, and reward different audiences or segments.
Capabilities for your call center
When an advocate calls your call center asking about an unreceived reward, you need to be able to provide a fast and accurate response. Look at your provider's customer care screens and resolution capabilities to make sure that this important part of the referral experience is not overlooked but is, rather, a strength. Your customers and customer service representatives will all benefit.
Furthermore, if your call center is involved in the signup process for new customers, part of the process may be asking whether the customer was referred, so that referrals can be captured manually to trigger the appropriate rewards. The call center is an overlooked part of the customer journey.
Breadth of rewards and reward rules
Standard rewards for most banks and financial institutions consist of points or account credits. Thoroughly evaluate not just these capabilities but also the ability to offer custom rewards and even gift cards. As your program grows and expands, having these options will be increasingly important. Get feedback from your customers as you diversify and test your rewards. Ensure that your reward is competitive in the market, as well as against other active promotions. For more on reward design, see our look at bank referral incentives.
Protecting against fraud and gaming
The best referral programs have rules in place to detect fraud as it happens. While actions like self-referral may take place, it is important to understand the intentions of your customer and to learn from how they are interacting with your program. Are these people only looking for rewards, or are they "deal-seekers" searching for the best offer? The best referral providers have experience with fraud controls and prevention that consider customer intent, and can generate program optimization plans accordingly.
Professional services and support desk
Finally, it is essential that your provider offer professional services that can contribute actively to the growth of your program, whether you require best-practices consulting, data analysis, creative services, technical services, program strategy, or support desk troubleshooting and issue investigation and resolution.
About Extole
Financial services companies use Extole to turn customers into advocates. Our enterprise technology and team of experts create powerful advocate and referral programs, so brands can harness the power of personal recommendations and sharing to the benefit of their bottom line. Extole enables marketers to engage thousands of advocates, scaling word-of-mouth to acquire new customers and increase loyalty using their greatest competitive advantage: their customers.
Putting these criteria into practice
Learn more about referral programs for banks and credit unions, or see how refer-a-friend programs work. When you are ready to see how these criteria play out in practice, request a demo.