Customer Engagement 2.0

Today Netbanker wrote a post about the rapid growth of the financial planning website Mint.com. According to Compete, Mint had 13% more visitors in July than in the month before. That makes a total of 460,000 visitors per month. That made me wonder how popular another personal finance website is: Wesabe. That site differentiates itself from Mint by fostering a lively community.

Compete: Mint vs Wesabe

On Compete it’s easy to compare the popularity of multiple websites. Compete monitors the online behavior of over 2 million Americans (with their permission), which form the basis for these statistics. From the graph it’s clear that Mint has a lot more visitors than Wesabe.

However, it’s always a little unclear how reliable these data are. Therefore I’ve done the same search with several other traffic measurement websites, using AttentionMeter. You can see the results after the break.

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When at the Forrester Financial Marketing event in New York, I had the pleasure to meet with Alyson Clarke, a principal Analyst at Forrester.  We sat together to discuss and share some ideas about Online Advice Tools. We talked about collaborative tools, simple tools like financial calculators, product selectors, and advice tools. She brought her analyst perspective and I shared my perspective as a technology vendor building richer interface solutions to many of the financial institutions.

Alyson’s take is that people are desperate for financial advice and that their needs are not met today. “Firms should focus on delivering a better customer experience starting by giving clients access to financial advice”, she told me. “The need for advice is amplified by new and complex taxes, pension reforms, turbulent markets, and complicated financial products. Most people can’t afford expert advice so most of them are shifting to the Internet in search for advice.” But advice delivery has not caught up.  Sure you can view your accounts, access general information, apply for a credit card or for a mortgage, and do some transactions, but where is the advice - the personal touch that people need – the collaboration?

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The Financial Brand writes about Goldwater Bank’s new website, which is a reflection of Goldwater’s upscale image. Their branch offices look more like posh hotel lobbies than the usual slightly run-down brownish interiors of many other banks. The article mentions Goldwater’s luxury offline amenities like concierge and couriers. So let’s take a closer look at their new website, and see whether it provides the same luxury experience.

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Because most mortgage shoppers get information online nowadays, traditional mortgage lenders need to improve the online customer experience. Therefore I set out to compare the websites of six large traditional lenders: Bank of America, Chase, Citibank, Countrywide, Washington Mutual and Wells Fargo. To give it some focus, I decided to focus on payment calculators, as Forrester thinks those are the most important. For an international comparison, we’ll be looking at the Moneyou calculator, a subsidiary of ABN AMRO.

The Test Scenario

A couple in California is looking to buy their first home in the next year, so they want to find out how much they can afford. They each make about $7000 a month and they have approximately $60k available for a down payment. They estimate they can pay approximately $4000 a month for their home.

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