Life @ Backbase

A usual start of the day: Cycle in the pouring rain to work, your computer doesn’t start and the office is out of coffee…. Too stressed to start working right away, so let’s steal a couple of minutes from the boss to check out some personal stuff online. But these minutes easily become 10, 20 minutes, because first you want to see the news, your personal email, watch a YouTube movie to make you feel good and oh, don’t forget to check out the weather, the sun might show up today!

The initial minutes become half an hour, because you have to go to each site separately, load it, sign in, skip the advertorials and commercial messages and do this 4 different times, for all your favorite sites.

Wouldn’t it be great (for your boss as well), if you could have all your most relevant sites combined in one site? No surfing, browsing, URL-typing needed, just one site that brings it all?

A lot of sites do offer some kind of automated personalization, based on predefined criteria like geographical area (IP recognition), the page you came from or click behavior. But till recently, all these sites were about customization of the site by the website-owner (they predefine the criteria), but only since recently you see sites where consumers themselves are in the drivers seat to create their own personalized websites, based on their criteria. This type of rich internet applications are called ‘Rich Portals”.

This is a big mind shift for a lot of companies. This is really about what the customer wants, and not what the company is offering. This trend is also taking place on the web and in my opinion this is definitely part of the Web2.0 trend: the consumer is in charge! Let’s look at a couple of examples.
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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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Many people have different opinions of what ‘Customer Engagement’ exactly stands for. In this article I don’t want to create yet another definition, but I’d like to elaborate on our understanding of Customer Engagement. In my opinion, it’s all about: how do we give what the customer wants (and maybe something more), giving them a positive feeling about the brand/product/service, so they are likely to become more loyal to the brand.

But then of course, the next question will be: How do we (the marketers of a brand/product/service) persuade our customers that we are worth their time, effort, money and commitment? We won’t be able to engage everyone, and we must accept that those who do engage with us will do so to different degrees and in different ways. Customer engagement isn’t a nirvana that can be reached; it is a process of developing and nurturing relationships.

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We’ve worked with a lot of online marketing and e-business teams at Global 2000 companies, and a commonly heard frustration is that IT is slowing down online innovations due to resource constraints and conflicting priorities

Marketing wants to go live quickly, run a lot of tests and make frequent updates, all to optimize conversion or tweak the user experience. IT wants to make sure systems are running smoothly, are maintainable and cost effective.

Does it really have to be so painful? No, we don’t think so. We’ve seen with several ways to ease the tension between e-business and IT, so both can meet their goals.

Background

First a little bit of background: we’ve implemented Rich Internet Applications at dozens of Global 2000 companies, usually to optimize online conversion, increase customer retention and cross-selling, or to improve the user experience in general. We usually get the order from the e-business department and work with IT for the implementation. We use the following strategies to speed up projects:

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On the Internet Evolution weblog Rob Geier presents some interesting findings from an Informationweek survey about Rich Internet Applications. According to the survey, the most important reason to use RIAs is improving the Customer Experience. Although management dashboards and customer support are also popular, many companies are already building RIAs for self-service and e-commerce.

Rob’s main RIA example is Home & Abroad, a personalized travel site. If you have a couple of minutes, use the ‘Quick Planner’ to see how they suggest a trip itinerary based on your preferences: pretty cool.

However, when I started editing my itinerary I wasn’t very impressed with the user experience. Until I realized why I wasn’t impressed:

► All travel planning sites need great faceted search!

And that’s what Home & Abroad is missing. I scoured the internet for some other examples. I found some good sites via the excellent Web 2.0 Travel blog and Travel+Leisure’s Top 25 Travel Sites. But let’s first define what we mean with Faceted Search.

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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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Last week I read an interesting article written by Nicoline van Elten, usability tester at Junglerating (a Dutch online marketing and  communication consultancy firm). Nicoline writes about the pros and cons of Rich Internet Applications, when to use them and especially when you shouldn’t.

She states that the advantages of RIAs are:

• Speed of the website
• Opening up information: simplify complex information
• Convenience (autofill)
• Multimedia perception (rich user experience)

In her article she also gives 6 important tips and tricks how to use RIAs in a valuable way, visualized by some great examples like the sliders used in the ABN AMRO applications. She concludes that RIAs do offer a lot of advantages, but that RIAs should only be used in functional applications.

I gave it some thought and I have to say that I agree with her. Think well about the usage of RIA, don’t use it because ‘you want to use the latest innovative technology’, but make sure it benefits your site, but most of all: if it benefits your target audience. Hip youngsters might like a very animated, personalized and customizable site, but older people might prefer a site that looks like the site they were used too, optimized with some nice rich internet applications which enable a friendly user interface.

Click here for the full article.

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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Steve Furman found out that an elaborate multi-channel campaign does not necessarily work. Mellon Investment asked him to confirm his tax payer identification number (TIN), by either phone or internet. However, he eventually had to print a PDF document, fill it out by hand, and use USPS to get it back to Mellon.

What went wrong?

On the Internet, the regular login worked, but he was locked out of his account when he was asked to repeat the credentials when confirming his TIN.

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