What Makes A Financial Service’s Website Successful?

Finan­cial ser­vices are faced with the chal­lenge of deliv­er­ing their cus­tomers with an online expe­ri­ence that goes far beyond just a web­site.

At one time, the inter­net appeared to offer all organ­i­sa­tions a sim­ple propo­si­tion: email con­nec­tiv­i­ty and a click­able pres­ence in the form of a web­site. Today, web pres­ence has rapid­ly evolved with inter­ac­tive con­tent and the abil­i­ty to deliv­er trans­ac­tion­al expe­ri­ences – or e-com­merce. Migrat­ing ser­vices online helps busi­ness reduce costs, while cus­tomers ben­e­fit from the con­ve­nience and auton­o­my of self-ser­vice.

Finan­cial ser­vices sites are absolute­ly com­pet­i­tive. They are real­ly try­ing to dri­ve peo­ple online. The self-ser­vice mod­el is being tak­en seri­ous­ly so they want to make sure their sites are avail­able, respon­sive and allow users to do as many things as pos­si­ble.

Though, many have shown an over­all poor per­for­mance. The top rea­sons for fail­ure were as fol­lows: com­pa­ny web­sites make brows­ing too dif­fi­cult; con­tent miss­ing, repeat­ed and

poor­ly word­ed; and site search doesn’t work for typ­i­cal tasks.

Here are three fac­tors for a suc­cess­ful online finan­cial ser­vice site which keeps users engaged and dis­plays great use of tech­nol­o­gy while still deliv­ers company’s mes­sages

clear­ly and effec­tive­ly:

• Cus­tomer expe­ri­ence, which includes the impres­sion the home­page and over­all design style give the cus­tomers, their sat­is­fac­tion when they inter­act with the site and per­form tasks.
• Best prac­tices, such as ease of use, qual­i­ty, avail­abil­i­ty and secu­ri­ty — site man­agers must be com­pli­ant with data laws requir­ing them to pro­tect cus­tomer infor­ma­tion and the integri­ty of cus­tomer accounts.
• Ser­vice-lev­el, which looks at respon­sive­ness and reli­a­bil­i­ty of web­sites — scores them on how quick­ly they respond to user com­mands and such fac­tors as aver­age down­time.

Finan­cial ser­vices must tie these three fac­tors togeth­er — cus­tomer expe­ri­ence, best prac­tices and reliability/responsiveness — to have an effec­tive web pres­ence. They can’t go hard into one par­tic­u­lar area and ignore the oth­ers. They have to under­stand what’s avail­able ver­sus their com­peti­tors, what con­sumers think of their sites ver­sus com­peti­tors’ and how their sites are per­form­ing.