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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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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