About The Customer

One of India’s leading private sector banks headquartered in South India. With a rich heritage of over a century, it consistently strives to provide innovative banking solutions to its customers. The bank was set up in 1916 to capitalize on the previously unexploited market of traders and agriculturists in and around a small town in Tamil Nadu. The bank later expanded in search of additional business opportunities and established a presence across India. The bank now operates with a vast network of 850+ branches and 2000+ ATMs.

Background

Modern banking customers expect 24/7 convenient access to services. With the shift towards digital banking, consumers now rely heavily on smartphones and online platforms for their banking needs. 

Google is the dominant search engine today, with a market share of well over 90%. This means consumers rely on Google search when they want to find their nearest branch or ATM.  

Hence, a robust presence on Google becomes mission-critical for location-based services like ATMs and branches, allowing banks to engage with customers directly in their moment of need. 

It enhances the online visibility of every offline touchpoint, boosts customer engagement, and improves the overall competitiveness of the bank in today’s digital landscape.

Enhanced Online Visibility and Reach

• Local Search: Most consumer searches for bank branches or ATMs are localized. They look for bank branches that are closer to their residence or place of work. The same applies to ATMs, as proximity to a consumer’s current location is a key choice driver.
  
• Local SEO: For both bank branches and ATMs, appearing in local search results is crucial. This means Google Business Profiles of every branch or ATM need to be accurate, verified, and complete, optimizing them for hyperlocal discovery.  

Building Trust and Credibility

• Reviews and Ratings: Studies show that 84% of consumers look at online reviews to choose location businesses. Ensuring all branches maintain a good online reputation (Star Rating >4) is key to attracting new customers.
  
• Review Response: Ensure all customer reviews across the branch network are responded to within 24 hours, showing that the bank is responsive to customer issues/feedback. This enhances credibility and trust, driving business growth.

• Local Updates: Sharing periodic updates on new schemes, offers, and more boosts customer engagement and conversions.

Competitive Advantage

• Research shows that 75% of Google Business Profiles of large multi-location businesses such as banks are inaccurate and incomplete. Ensuring the accuracy and consistency of every offline touchpoint online boosts visibility and engagement, enabling the bank to attract more new customers over the competition.
  
• Analytics & Insights: Location-level search trends and online consumer behavior can help personalize service offerings, enhancing customer engagement and driving business growth. 

Business Challenges

The bank and its branches were renowned for their excellent in-branch services. However, they faced a significant hurdle: understanding and leveraging the importance of their digital presence to cater to Gen-Z customers who primarily searched online for information and services. This gap also impacted their ability to drive walk-ins through effective online visibility.

1. Lack of Understanding of Google Business Profiles (GBPs):

• The in-house digital team had limited awareness of GBPs’ potential and role in enhancing local visibility.
• They lacked insight into the extent of their existing GBP footprint, including how profiles were accessed or managed.

2. Uncontrolled Consumer Edits:

• Consumers frequently edited profiles directly on Google, leading to rampant inaccuracies.
• Key business details such as Name, Address, Phone numbers (NAP), timings, services, and website links were often incorrect or inconsistent.

3. Unclaimed and Duplicate Profiles:

• Hundreds of unclaimed or duplicate profiles created confusion, diluted the bank’s digital presence, and negatively impacted search engine visibility.

4. Poor Local Search Visibility:

• Inconsistent and incomplete profiles meant the bank was not accurately represented in local “Near Me” searches, making it harder for potential customers to find and trust the branches online.

Challenge for the In-House Team:

The digital team lacked a clear roadmap to identify, claim, and manage the scattered profiles effectively. This led to a growing need for an organized approach to reclaim their digital presence.

Solution

Centralized Listing Management and Enterprise Grade Notification Engine to control and manage over 2500+ GBPs seamlessly.

Identification of missing/duplicate profiles – Zceppa created a custom GBP scanning tool to conduct an audit of existing locations and understand gaps in missing locations, locations with access, unverified locations, etc, across India. Within a few days, Zceppa identified over 1000+ missing or duplicate profiles by scanning Google and comparing it with the bank’s list of locations.

Creation of missing GBPs – Automated GBPs creation using Zceppa’s robust AI-driven GBP creation tool was able to create 1000s of missing profiles in hours and automated claiming of profiles to which the bank did not have access. This resulted in the bank saving over 80 man hours to the overall process.

Enabling bulk verification of GBPs – Zceppa enabled bulk verification for the bank to ensure verification of locations was completed at scale (100s of them together) without any manual intervention. Google Business Verification in bulk can be a tricky process – Zceppa provided inputs to the bank on how the public assets (website, social media etc.) had to be cleaned up to enable this process. Zceppa’s team liaised with Google to complete the Bulk Verification process, getting all the branch locations and ATMs to go live within weeks. 

GBP Standardization at Scale – Zceppa did a thorough audit of current profiles and provided recommendations on improvements that could be made to profiles to drive greater visibility. In addition to suggesting best practices and guidelines, the tool allowed key updates across locations at scale to make bulk updates. 

Central Notification Engine to Manage GBPs – before Zceppa implementation, the digital team at the bank was clueless about how to manage profiles and how the whole process would look. The Central Dashboard feature in Zceppa allowed the bank to track the overall status of profiles, take action if there were issues, and keep track of any changes done to GBPs through customer edits or changes suggested by Google all from a single place. This made GBP management a breeze for the bank’s digital team.

Business Outcomes

100% Verified Listings in under 60 days for 2500+ profiles – It was a record of sorts for this financial services provider to go from not knowing the status of their 1000s of Google Business Profiles to 100% fully live and verified list. The fact that this happened within 60 days was a big icing on the cake & their assets started appearing on local searches. 

Local SEO Optimized Profiles – Not only did the profiles go live, but Zceppa also helped audit and optimize all of the locations for consistency as per the best Local SEO standards for NAP, website links and location pages. To improve ranking, Zceppa implemented the Smart Reply feature so the brand’s marketing team could get a head start.

5X Increase in Search Visibility – Post implementation, Zceppa also reviewed the monthly Google Analytics for trends and opportunities. Within a month of going live all of the locations – bank branches and ATMs saw an immediate & 5X jump in online searches. This provides for a very healthy trend and the brand is on their path making the next steps.