Customer Engagement 2.0

Boaz Ronkin just published an inspiring article on engagement and conversion. It is about the “engagement” stage in the online marketing paradigm: “acquire, engage, convert, retain”. He argues that engagement for engagement’s sake does not make any sense, and that engagement should always serve the conversion goal.

This blog is all about customer engagement, so we always emphasize the importance of the engagement phase. We’ve seen many examples where engagement plays an essential role on websites. Especially for complex products (for example mortgages or cars), customers will not make a purchase decision before they feel totally comfortable with all the options.

Conversion, however, is still the ultimate goal. I fully agree with Boaz that engagement by itself is not what you want to optimize for. Engagement should prepare the visitor for a purchase decision or a registration (e.g. becoming pre-qualified for a mortgage). With standard web analytics tools you can usually measure the correlation between visitor engagement and conversion, so that’s what you optimize for.

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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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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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