New search experiences are reframing consumer expectations in financial services. Advances in AI have made search engines capable of answering complex queries with great specificity, and your customers are being trained to search for exactly what they want. They expect answers — because search engines have shown they can provide them. 

Your organization can meet this need by building and maintaining your own brand knowledge graph, which allows you to manage your information at scale and deliver the right answers everywhere your customers are asking questions. As a result, you’re able to meet your customers at the moment of intent — leading to a better customer experience, lower operational costs, and increased discoverability and conversion.

Here’s how a knowledge graph can work for your organization.

Answer complex financial questions in search experiences

When your customers search for things like advisors, office locations, and mortgage rates, they’re not searching for those words — they’re searching for the real things those words refer to. They’re showing a strong intent to actually work with your organization. A knowledge graph can help you reach them at the right moment. 

Let’s use an example: A potential customer searches for “best financial advisors near me who handle estate planning.” Delivering the correct answer requires information from across your organization: ratings (“best”), office location (“near me”), professionals (“financial advisor”), and specialty (“estate planning”). How can your financial services organization deliver an answer to a question — on your own website or in search results — that requires information from operations, facilities, and other departments?

With a knowledge graph, you can define the relationships between all these entities (e.g., your professionals, locations, hours, and more) so that an AI-powered discovery service like Google, Alexa, or Siri can answer this question. In doing so, your organization increases its chances of ranking for that specific, high-intent query. 

If your information is incomplete, or if your entities aren’t mapped to one another in a way that search engines understand (via a knowledge graph), your organization won’t show up in search results — and a competitor might instead. This can lead that potential customer, who’s looking for help with estate planning, to choose a different financial advisor over one of your professionals.  

Deliver answers to customers on your website

Customers are beginning to expect sophisticated answers from your website because search engines have shown that they can provide them. However, the on-website experience often doesn’t live up to these expectations.

Let’s say someone receives a personal recommendation for a financial advisor at Expert Advisors named Danielle Lopez. Instead of making a general search for an advisor, they start their journey on the Expert Advisors website, looking for Danielle Lopez’s phone number.

After clicking through just a few different pages, however, they’re likely to give up if they can’t find the information. They’ve been trained by Google, Alexa, and Siri to just ask questions, but they can’t do that on most websites. And what do most consumers do when information isn’t easy to find? They give up, returning to exactly where they would have started their journey otherwise — a search engine. 

This could lead to them finding incorrect information about your organization, or even finding a competitor. Delivering the answers customers are now trained to expect, directly on your website, leads to a better customer experience and higher conversions — meaning more revenue. Building and maintaining a knowledge graph enables you to take control of this experience. 

If a customer searches, for example, for a “financial advisor near me who speaks Spanish,” and your website’s information is structured to answer this question, then they can find Danielle Lopez’s individual page (which includes her office address, hours, and phone number). The customer can easily call or email to book an appointment directly from the result. 

That’s a great, seamless customer experience — one that leads directly to bookings and revenue.