Case Study: Social Media @ Wells Fargo – Listening to Customers through Social Media Command Center

Wells Fargo made significant investments to set up its Social Media Marketing unit over the past 5 years for listening and evaluating the voice of their customers on various social networking sites and platforms effectively and respond to their grievances and queries. In an interview with Portada,  Wells Fargo's CMO Jamie Moldafsky  said, "In the past 18 months we established new policies and processes, engaged partners and people, and launched new platforms to move from social test/learn to having a robust social business. We have a hub and spoke model where an enterprise team develops the capabilities, accelerants and guardrails for the company to follow." Wells Fargo established "social media command center" in San Francisco and a backup location in Charlotte — where employees keep an eye on  eight large screens that display Tweets, Facebook posts and other social media content published about the brand, engage with consumers on topics that are trending and quickly respond to specific customer queries.

Both the command centers are constantly monitored by dedicated staff five days a week, 12 hours a day and the bank deployed technology of Salesforce.com that monitors the mentions of its name around the clock so that the bank keep watch on customer’s response to various products and services, or initiatives such as establishing more computerized smaller branches. "It's a fundamental change to consumer behavior," says Renee Brown, the head of the enterprise social media team at Wells Fargo. "[Social media] is the new water cooler and street corner where people are gathering to talk.” The monitoring is also helps in better handling of complaints and negative comments as large banks regularly face complaints related to everything from poor branch service to questionable fees to their handling of foreclosures, and in the social media world it is very important for banks to quickly acknowledge the complaints and make an effort to resolve them. As part of its social media outreach, Wells Fargo has a "social care" unit to which it refers many of its customer complaints.

In the year 2013, Wells Fargo was mentioned more than one million times on social media sites and comments included a mix of positive and negative comments. In an interview with Portada, Wells Fargo's CMO Jamie Moldafsky said, "in 2013, we significantly increased engagement, fans and followers and have seen improvements in sentiment by integrating and moving toward a socially engaged business. We’re excited about the engagement we’ve experienced so far."  We have a terrific team of more than 75 social practitioners that meet regularly across all of our businesses to build and support our social media content and programs. Social media also allows us to spread our marketing messages very quickly and effectively, particularly when integrated into our marketing campaigns. When our millions of fans tell their friends that they like our products and services which helps change perception more than anything else." Wells Fargo have always been an early adopters of technology and Wells Fargo executives were the first in banking industry to adopt the new social, mobile technologies to help deepen customer relationships.