LinkedIn Pages

How HSBC Relationship Managers Build Strong Relationships with Customers Using LinkedIn Elevate

This guest post was contributed by Camila Romuld, Digital and Social Media Marketing Manager, HSBC.

Our relationship managers are the key link between our customers and HSBC in our thousands of offices all over the world. We value their knowledge of our services and their customers’ markets. Within HSBC, we knew that the relationship managers do much more than simply handle basic operations. We wanted our RMs to share the vast amount of HSBC thought leadership content with a wider audience, so they could show their ability to carry on strategic and high-quality conversations with our customers.

An employee advocacy program, we decided, would help position our RMs as partners, raise awareness of the HSBC brand — and help us dig deeper into who’s engaging with us and why. I like to say that employee advocacy is the oldest form of marketing, and when you marry it to the newest technology, social media, you have a new way to build word of mouth, from the people your audience trusts the most. LinkedIn’s Elevate has figured out this formula, so it was our choice for an employee advocacy platform.

When we first considered employee advocacy solutions, reporting on engagement was perhaps the most important feature for us. When it comes to data about audience demographics, like industries and titles of people who engage with our content, LinkedIn is unmatched. We want to go beyond just basic share rates and engagement — we need to understand the people and companies who respond to the content our employees are sharing.

The Elevate feed lets us suggest a mix of content from both HSBC and sources beyond the company, like news stories from The Economist and Bloomberg. We think our employees should be talking with customers about topics outside of HSBC – that way, customers will see that our RMs are on top of what’s happening in the world.

Our local offices love the Elevate feed for the choices it gives them on content relevant to their unique audiences. Their needs are different from other regions, so they like to customize shared content. For example, our Israel employees recently shared content about the launch of The Floor, an online hub about what’s new in financial technology.

Sharing content of local interest isn’t just good for our audiences – it helps builds support for the employee advocacy program, and we get enthusiastic buy-in from our local managers. We help stoke that enthusiasm by sharing news of employees’ embrace of advocacy. We send a weekly email to our local admins congratulating our most engaged users – and inspire everyone to keep sharing and engaging with their connections. The Elevate mobile app also motivates employees to share, since they don’t need to be at their desks and in front of their computers to engage with customers.

Our choice of Elevate delivered on the promise of helping RMs build stronger relationships with customers. Employees are sharing content 9x as often as they did before Elevate – and as a result are getting 3x more connection requests and 3x more views of their profile. Employees’ increased sharing via Elevate is also helping influence 4x more new followers of HSBC’s Company Page. These are clear signs that employees love using Elevate, and that it’s become part of their everyday outreach to customers.

For a deep dive into the power of employee advocacy, download The Official Guide to Employee Advocacy today.