Why should call tracking be a key part of a financial services marketing toolkit?

Harry Bott

Written by Harry Bott

Category: Marketing attribution
Fintech is transforming all areas of financial services by removing inefficiencies, improving regulatory compliance, and automating processes to increase speed and lower the potential for mistakes. You can’t of course remove the human element from the customer side.

Yet humans are as inefficient and inconsistent as ever. However, with more channels available to customers to use and interact with your financial products, it’s vital to manage and understand those interactions.

If a customer wants to contact you from your website, they can do so through the following ways:

  • Face to face
  • Telephone
  • Email
  • Online forms
  • Messaging services (including via an app)

Looking at this list, the first two involve human interaction. The others involve a digital process that sits between the customer and you. These are the areas that technology is helping to manage – hence the rise of focused CRM software that can deal with data in an automated fashion. With face-to-face and the telephone, it’s much more difficult to manage and control the outcomes, as they involve humans on an instant, one-to-one basis.

The trend in financial services is moving towards trying to remove humans from the equation because this is perceived as a cost saving. Furthermore, it’s easier to ensure everything follows regulatory processes and it is easy to report against. We’ve seen this with some of the new challenger banks such as Atom and Mondo that are app-based and have made it virtually impossible to contact them via the phone or face-to-face. Is this a short-sighted approach? By removing humans from the transaction, you are removing trust.

The phone plays a vital channel for customers to interact with your business. The key is understanding how this works in a much more nuanced way. Many financial services transactions can be completed via a form fill, without talking to anyone. However, many customers want to talk to a person. To understand this, we’ve come up with a an easy to understand matrix that compares the complexity of the product offering with its price. In the example below, we look at examples of different insurance products and where the phone sits within the marketing mix:

Propensity to call matrix.

Low price / low complexity

A typical example of this might be travel insurance or day-long car insurance. Travel insurance is low value, and it’s difficult to find contact details on the website to talk to someone because all the relevant data can be entered online.

High price / low complexity

Car insurance is a typical example of this. The reason why comparison sites are so powerful is that they can use the same information to get multiple quotes. Once this data has been collated the sign-up process is also easy. With car insurance, you’ll see companies providing a telephone number, but often this is difficult to find.

High price / high complexity

As the product being insured is more complex, the consumer wants to talk to someone to understand how this will affect their policy. An example of this would be with a specialist art policy that requires a bespoke approach. The consumer wants to pick up the phone and talk to an advisor to make sure that all the quirks of their policy are included. In this instance, the telephone is at the fore of the response mechanism.

In conclusion

In a cost focused world, it’s very easy to try and drive out interactions by phone due to the costs of employing people to answer the calls. The complexity and cost of your product will dictate whether you should keep the telephone as a key response mechanism. Using call tracking technology, you can achieve 100% attribution for what prompted a call, and the outcome. With this linkage, call tracking has joined the fintech revolution.

Find out more how attribution can help your business in our whitepaper and join other leading financial institutions, such as F&C Asset Management and Worldpay, in optimising your marketing.

Download the whitepaper here