Customer Engagement 2.0

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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In the July 14th issue of DMNews, Dana Kevish, Interactive Marketing Manager for acehardware.com, chats about her most recent collaboration with GSI Commerce—the “choose your location” component using geo-location technology. In layman terms, the “choose your location” component is an Ajax-based Rich Internet Application (RIA) feature that gives visitors the option to search for local Ace stores depending on address or location. By using geo-location technology, the Ace website identifies your approximate location so you don’t have to enter an address. Because the store locator is a mashup, Ace store locations are automatically displayed on Google Maps. There are two benefits for doing this: first, Ace didn’t have to develop their own mapping component; and second, users are greeted with a familiar user 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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This year’s Forrester Financial Services Forum for Marketing and Strategy Professionals was focused on how to deliver great customer experience.  It covered best practices, cross channel strategies but also many sessions were covering online experience especially through the use of software tools.  One such session I found pretty interesting was from National City.  I liked it because National City clearly made the effort to measure the return on investment of the Online Chat tool they implemented.  Their goal was to increase customer engagement which ultimately would increase revenue.

First, some interesting data from Forrester: 54% of the people who abandon an online application i.e. for brokerage accounts, home equity loans, mortgage accounts, and personal loans intended to complete the process. If you’re able to engage them before, then you might prevent them from abandoning the application. And according to Forrester research, human intervention has proven to help prevent abandonment by “intenders.“

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