Find the next market opportunities through real-time customer feedback

How to find the next market opportunities through real-time customer feedback analysis?

Hello and welcome to Affogata’s podcast: Let’s talk customer feedback. We had the pleasure of hosting Mongiwethu Kumalo, Community Management Executive at IG.

Mongiwethu encourages thought and discussion about different topics of interest to today’s traders in the IG Community. This includes the financial markets and macro-economic news announcements, trading strategies, charting and trading platform features to make respondents feel comfortable and to foster a feeling of community among the respondents as they engage with their fellow participants on the IG community. He moderates the discussions to ensure compliance with the community guidelines and rules deals with member queries and helps to keep the IG informed of the overall trend of comments and conversations that community members are having.

It has been discussed lately that customers have lost trust in the financial industry, but fintech startups are changing the narrative. Fintechs have a real opportunity to transform how customers engage with the global economy, but the stakes are high. Customers need to feel they can depend on your app or platform to provide a good experience, keep their money secure, and help them achieve their desired results.

What's this podcast episode all about?

1. Mongi shared with us the influence that customer feedback has on his day-to-day job and how IG prioritizes and improves customer experience with the influence of this feedback.

2. A conversation on how intertwined the level of community engagement is with the level of customer churn and Mongi shared his own tips on how to reduce customer churn.

3. We asked Mongi how crucial is for fintech companies to listen to the voice of their customers from the communities and make relevant changes to the product and had. discussion on how much he really thinks companies are doing it.

4. Lastly, Mongi answered how much gathering and analyzing real-time customer feedback can influence positively the trust of customers toward financial services.

Audio version

Transcript

Host:

Can't wait to hear what Monggi has to say about all this. So let's start. For the first question, how does customer feedback influence your day-to-day as a community management executive at IG?

Speaker - Mongi Kumalo, Community Management Executive at IG

Well, customer feedback is an essential guide and informs my decision-making and influences innovations and changes to IG products and services. It's essential for measuring customer satisfaction among our current customers and getting a handle on how customers view our products, support, and services. So when I'm collecting customer feedback on the IG community, we show we value their opinions. Their opinions are important to us and we involve them in shaping our business so they feel more attached to our company. And listening to their voice helps us create stronger relations with the clients and helps us build loyalty for the IG brand.

Host:

Yeah, I think that really listening to your customers always brings the ultimate loyalty. So I completely agree with you. And how does IG prioritize and improve customer experience?

Speaker - Mongi Kumalo, Community Management Executive at IG

Well, customer experience it's important because customers say is plain and simple. One of our core values is to champion the client to feel how they feel and anticipate their needs. So, like I said, listening to the customers is a top priority across the business for us. We use customer feedback to develop an in-depth understanding of our customers, to implement a system to help us collect feedback, analyze it, and act on it on a regular basis and we want to ensure customers have a positive engagement at all touchpoints to fulfill the customer's expectations.

If you understand what customers are looking for, we will always be on our way to being able to give to them whatever is needed. So creating a connection, it's important to build a trusting relationship with them. We demonstrate that we will be there with them every step of the way. So we also prioritize responsiveness to find solutions to problems quickly so customers can get back to using our products and services even if a problem cannot be fixed immediately. Simply acknowledging that we are working on the issue can go a long way to improving a customer's opinion of our services and lastly, continuously improving their experience. We collaborate with the customers to identify opportunities to further enhance their experience and results of our products and services and look for ways to meet customers changing needs.

Host:

I actually really liked when you said that you use customer feedback also to anticipate problems and other needs because that means that IG is not only reactive but also proactive. So I think that's super important for our brand. And how important and intertwined, in your opinion, is the level of community engagement with the level of customer churn?

Speaker - Mongi Kumalo, Community Management Executive at IG

Well, measuring the engagement of the community is important because it provides me with insights into how well our content is resonating with our customers. We are able to use this information to optimize posts in the future or improve our products and services, so it also gives us a tangible metric to track our performance over time. Our engagement level is great. Members are connecting with our brand, members are commenting, liking, and sharing, and they continue to mention our brand all the time.

In the community, we have improved our community engagement by posting content worth engaging with, responding to all comments, and most importantly, encouraging our readers to comment and like. So we're actually going to be running contests and giveaways which will be exciting for our community members. And in regards to the churn level in the community, it's low. We make our products the very best they can be and we are always consistent with asking for feedback from our community members.

Host:

Right. That's actually very important. So you can maintain that engagement. And in your opinion, what are the best tactics to reduce customer churn?

Speaker - Mongi Kumalo, Community Management Executive at IG

Well, the most obvious method of keeping customers by your side is giving a better service. Poor service is the leading case of customer churn. Now, preventing churn is key to improving customer retention and revenue. Right? So customer churn is an important metric to track because lost customers equal lost revenue, there are ways to reduce customer churn. You have to analyze why churn is happening. So before tackling a problem, you need to identify the cause. That means gathering customer feedback and measuring what is going on.

Whenever you detect churn in your business methods to find out why, if possible, is call the customers. It shows you care and it's your best shot at gathering and getting the depth of information around their reasons for the churning that can make a real difference for your business. It also gives you the chance to ask follow-up questions and clarify things if needed.

Another way to reduce is to engage with the customers, which is often referred to as relationship marketing. So give your customers reasons to keep coming back by showing them the day-to-day value of using your products by making our products, services, and offerings a part of their daily workflow.

Lastly, pay attention to their complaints. They suggest that the bigger part of the problem is hidden from the view. So taking complaints seriously and acting on them is a way to prevent customer churn. Usually, in most cases, dissatisfied customers whose complaints are attended to are more likely to remain loyal and even become advocates than other average customers.

Host:

Yeah, I completely agree with you and actually, I think these are great tactics to share with everybody. So thank you for that. So there must be a lot of noise and millions of conversations in your communities at IG see at the end of the day, people that invest their money are very engaged. How do you handle all of the data and how do you manage to find the most important feedback from your customers?

Speaker - Mongi Kumalo, Community Management Executive at IG

Well, data analysis skills are important and data has become the fuel of marketing success. I use data analytics and content preferences with the help of the community and analytics tool. I'm able to identify my main interests. As a result, I'm able to create personalized content, paying attention to the customers' needs and what they expect from us. I'm also able to achieve a more consistent following base.

Just to add, with the help of data analytics and our customer engagement strategy, we also achieved a more consistent engagement rate for all of our posts and maintain the activity level. So in the community, I've managed to obtain valuable feedback from the community members by posting forums and blogs with polls. They give us feedback on their votes. Like I mentioned earlier, we'll be running contests in the community. We provide an active online community with support. This data has left me with the most important lesson to learn, which is no matter how big or small a company is, there should always be some kind of customer service which would receive insights from customers and personalize their customer experience. And our community is very significant and has given us significant results and available data after all.

Host:

Well, that's actually great. And now that we're talking about this, I would also love to hear from you. How important do you think is for fintech companies to listen to the voice of their customers from the communities and make relevant changes to the product? And moreover, how much do you think companies are actually doing this?

Speaker - Mongi Kumalo, Community Management Executive at IG

Okay. So if we look at, let's say the gaming industry. Right, it's important for them to have excellent customer service. Right. So imagine you're playing a game and there's a glitch that impacts your ability to complete a task or the game you're playing isn't working properly. Now when you reach out for customer service, you probably want a quick response that can help you troubleshoot as soon as possible. Now, gamers use a lot of online forums to troubleshoot customer support issues. They go on to online gamer communities to talk to other players and help each other fix an issue.

So for a gaming company, being active on these forums is incredibly important. Their support team will be up to date on the latest issues and glitches and be able to directly communicate with current players. So it's important that when players have issues, they have somewhere to go. Perhaps gaming companies can provide an excellent customer experience by providing an in-game support channel so players don't have to leave their game to get quick 24/7 support. So the relevant changes would be speeding up response times. If they improve troubleshooting skills by posting solutions to the problems that must be solved in a set time, that would be a very positive change. How much do I think companies are doing it?

I think the majority of companies are doing it on a wild scale at a high level. Listening to customers, giving companies valuable feedback. After all, the best business decisions are based on concrete data and not guessing or estimates. So to really understand how your customers feel about your product or services you deliver, using their feedback will guide your business and marketing decisions.

Host:

I agree. And I realized that you also mentioned the gaming industry because, like the fintech industry, most of the time both industries have a lot of money involved. Either you spend on a game or you trade or you want to invest. So at the end of the day, customers do expect the best customer experience. So I think you're totally right. And Mongi, for the last question. Do you think that listening in real-time to your customer feedback can influence positively the trust of customers towards financial services?

Speaker - Mongi Kumalo, Community Management Executive at IG

Well, when we're looking at real-time feedback, right. This will result in a fresh, honest response. When you ask customers for feedback because they feel valued and appreciated, it shows the company cares about their opinion. And when you request feedback in real-time, it's even more powerful as it becomes an inseparable part of the customer's immediate experience. So this really does strengthen the customer trust.

If you compare real-time feedback and surveys. Right. Real-time feedback gets higher response rates. So when a customer has just completed an interaction, their attention is still on your product or service. So you don't want to miss the opportunity to grab a hold of their willingness to share with you. So real-time feedback helps pinpoint issues down to the exact day and time as it's received and precisely matches the customer's experience and this can make it much easier to identify and solve problems. So real-time feedback enables quick improvements for businesses not to drag their feeds in solving a problem. Customer complaints can get solved faster and it's with the help of real-time feedback.

So trust and loyalty are the building blocks of a solid customer base and earning customer trust doesn't require any complex strategy. The best step you can take is to offer excellent customer service and ensure that your support team knows the importance of their roles. Essentially, the goal is to put your customer first and make sure that those customers know they are your top priority, and when you accomplish this goal you can be confident that the customers' trust and loyalty will follow closely.

Host:

I really like that ending Mongi. I really want to thank you so much for taking the time to participate in today's podcast. It was super interesting to learn about your take on the importance of customer feedback and how to utilize it to improve the product and create an ultimate customer experience.

Speaker - Mongi Kumalo, Community Management Executive at IG

Oh, thank you so much Natalie this was great and fun really hoping to have more of these podcasts with you again in the future. So again thank you for hosting me.

Host:

Definitely, and thanks all for listening, and don't forget to visit www.Affogata.com