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.“

People at National City have done some interesting research themselves. They found that their customers preferred using multiple channels and sometimes simultaneously. They would for instance do research online, then call the main number, and then a branch. They also found out that injecting the human element into their online experience improves their relationship and drives healthy portions of their online sales. Their surveys showed that their customers wanted to be able to have a dialog online, and wanted the experience to be as good as in a branch.  National City has found that Chat was a good fit for that, as well as for building trust and relationship.

So why did National City choose to offer online Chat?  In that session they mentioned that in addition to the need for aligning with their multi channel approach, it was to:

• Reduce visitor to application leakage
• Increase conversion rates and overall bookings
• Improve the customer experience
• Reduce reliance on more expensive channels
• Help customers become comfortable with online applications

Their results were pretty impressive.
National City gets about 600 Chat requests a day. For this initial pilot, 5 sales agents dedicated to Chat were used. They cover 5 days a week 8am-8pm. One sales agent can handle up to 3 applications at the same time, so cost per contact is a lot less than using phone or branch personnel.  Today 6% of the applications include Chat while 10% of bookings resulted from Chat. Growth of chat as an attributed factor of booked sales has grown by 90% since December 2007. The Chat solution was paid back in 9 months.

In my opinion, the National City use of Chat for their online presence made for a powerful case study.  Chat humanizes the online experience and ultimately ended up in increased sales.  The compliance issues were not covered but it is my understanding that they were the reason for the long approval process for the project.

What is your take on the effectiveness of Chat? Do you have interesting metrics that you want to share?