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We've been studying the Internet and financial services since the beginning. In
that time, there are some things we think we've learned. Here are a few we think
you might find useful.
The first time we were asked this question, we were a bit perplexed. It seems
obvious, at least obvious to us, that when it comes to financial services and
the Internet availability, performance, and
functionality matter critically. But after talking about it a bit, we
found that the question really stemmed from some fairly fundamental
misconceptions about the Internet and financial services. Reduced to it's
essentials, this is why we think it is important.
- Financial services are not fun. By and large financial
services rank right up there with doing the laundry on most consumer's lists
of fun things. In marketing speak, financial services are a low interest
habituated activity. In simple English, consumers are not especially
interested and when they do "commit" financial services they behave more or
less like they did last time.
- Financial services are, well, services not products. There are
some exceptions, of course, but by and large financial service institutions
are just that, service institutions. Being in a service business has many
important characteristics. One of the most important is that success
requires responding to the customer's needs with high levels of service.
- Financial service institutions do not provide much of anything their
customers actually want. Again, there are, of course, some exceptions,
but by and large financial service institutions provide services that
enable, that help their customers meet some other need. The service is not
the primary want, it is the enabler. Think about it. Most people do not want
a mortgage, they want a house and need a mortgage. When it comes right down
to it, they do not actually want a checking account or to pay their bills,
they want the lights to come on when needed and need to pay their bills
using a checking account. Financial services are by their nature enablers
that only have value in the context of some customer need.
- Financial service institutions can not create the need. Again
some exceptions, but for the most part the need is independent of the
services you offer and thus you can do little to manipulate it. If you think
"cross sell and up sell" are sensible notions, get over it. Think
"opportunity detection and engagement."
These central realities of the financial services industry have a number of
important implications for doing business on the Internet. Here are some that we
think are particularly important.
- Financial services web sites are not fun. Since your
services are not fun, it is unlikely that your site is going to be. Trying
to make it fun is probably a mistake, since your customer just wants to get
on with whatever they are trying to do.
- Consumers go to
financial services Web sites because they need something. They need to transact or
plan or purchase. The point behind your Web site is to quickly and
effectively engage that need.
- Availability is essential. Reliable availability is even more so.
This should be "self evident," but if our experiences with
financial industry Web sites is any guide, it's not. If your site is not up,
it might as well not exist. Financial services Internet sites are a bit like
ATMs. It only takes a couple of "page not found" errors or "page load"
errors and your customer will never come back. Reliable availability is essential.
- Responsiveness is essential.
Your customer is only there
because they need something. If your site is not responsive they will not
wait around to be abused. They will leave and probably not come back or worse yet,
go to your competitor's site.
- Functionality is essential. Sales and service functionality is
even more so. Your customer is only there because they have a need.
If your site can not meet your customer's current need quickly and easily it
might as well not exist. Everyone knows how to do transactions. Almost no
one knows how to do sales and service. Since banking is a service business
your sales and service functionality is critical.
Those are the essentials, but there are a couple of additional things we
think are important.
- You can not drive traffic to a financial services web site.
Your site is there to engage need. You can do little to create
need. QED - you can do little to drive traffic. That
said, there are things, particularly service related things, you can do to
stimulate need.
- Conversely, you can easily drive traffic away. When engaging a
customer with low interest one of the most important things it to not
offend. It only
takes a few relatively minor bad experiences to convince most customers to
do something else. As a consequence all you have to do to drive traffic away
is make a few relatively minor mistakes. There are many easy and convenient ways to do this.
- The customer gets to decide if and when to engage your web site.
No matter what you do, the customer gets to decide if and when to
engage your Web site.
- You will be compared to sites that do Internet for a living.
Your sites responsiveness and functionality will be compared to the
user's other Internet experiences, to Google, Amazon, eBay, etc. It's not
enough to be as good as the other bank; you've got to be as good as some of
the best sites on the Web.
There are many ways to
measure availability and performance. You can find a
simplified technical tutorial here. Most measure technology,
not the user's experience. While the technology is important, the user's
experience is what really drives your business. The most effective way to do
that is to measure on the user side of the browser.
Our preferred technique is to use com automation of Internet Explorer. Using
some proprietary techniques we developed, we are able to accurately measure page
load times at the millisecond level. We have seen a few pages where this
approach does not work acceptably. When we encounter such situations we first
augment IE com automation with window monitoring. To date that has always
worked. In the event that it ever fails we also have available frame "onload"
and straight window monitoring.
The bottom line is that we measure what really drives your business, the
user's experience.
Many of us, initially me included, would regard this as something of a trivial
questions. After all, I know when I'm using a browser and navigate to a page
when it's complete. How hard can it be to measure?
As it turns out, it is rather more difficult to measure than you might
imagine. The difficulty derives from two sources.
- First, a page is really only complete when the user's purpose for
loading the page is satisfied. Since measurement engines do not know
what the user's purpose is, they must substitute some technical proxy in
its stead.
- Second, because of the way real browsers really work, it is very
difficult to accurately and reliably measure the technical proxies.
You can find a simplified technical tutorial
on page completion here. We regard a page as complete when the browser
has finished drawing it on the screen (a reasonable approximation to what
most users would judge). We measure the user's experience.
When a user comes to your site, they
have a need. It might be a transaction need, or a service need, or, rarely,
a sales need. It might also be secondary need such as community information,
investor information, employment openings, etc. If you want your site to be
truly successful, you need to be able to respond effectively to a broad
spectrum of user needs.
Since user's have many needs, your site's success depends not just on
transactions, but a full range of functionality. In the early days of online
financial services, there was tremendous emphasis on transactions. As a
consequence, in today's environment most institutions have good to
outstanding transaction engines. Indeed, it can be argued that there is
generally relatively little to distinguish one institution from another in
this regard. The real differences are in the areas of service and sales.
The user's need is the user's need. It's important to the user regardless of
its importance to you. Your needs and the user's needs are not always conformal.
Sometimes the user wants something you are not especially interested in. Even
so, the user's need is important to the user. Since you are in a service
business, by and large, it makes good sense to engage the user's need if it is
reasonably possible to do so.
There is an inherent conflict between some user needs and some financial
institution needs. This conflict creates inherent issues in site design and
functionality. There is no right way to resolve this conflict. There are,
however, different ways. The important thing here is that you recognize the
issue and choose how to deal with it.
What's more valuable to you,
transactional services that are a break even proposition or resolving a $35
branch service interaction for $0.03 on the Internet? While it's true that you need
to have a good transactional capability, it's not true that transactional
services are the only important Internet capability or even the most
important one. Indeed, we believe that for most financial service
institutions the most valuable capabilities are in service and sales, not
transactions.
There are many ways to measure availability and performance. Each reveals
something useful for some question, but they are not the same. When it comes to
the Internet's impact on your business, we think that measuring the user's
experience is ultimately the most important.
It's not that we think measuring technology isn't important, it is. If your
technology doesn't work, your user's experience is guaranteed to be bad. But,
technology measurements don't tell you what your user is
experiencing. You can have generally good technology and your users can
still have a bad experience. A site can be technically available in the sense that it
responds to pings, yet it will not deliver a browser's URL request. A URL
can be available in the sense that it can be opened over the net and its
bytes read, yet a browser can not load it because the page's images, ads,
etc.; are not available. Conversely, if the user's experience is good, your
technology is almost guaranteed to be working well. At the end of the day, it's important to measure
the user experience, not just the technology.
The first is that you
can only measure the user's experience in the context of the need. It's not
enough to measure availability and performance for transactional services.
You need to know how you are doing across the spectrum of your sites
functionality and your user's needs. You need to measure your home page,
service and sales pages, community information pages, investor pages, etc.
You need to probe the URLs that matter to you and your users, that have high
value to you and your users, not just
transactions.
Even the simplest financial service institution web site has
roughly 100 pages. Some, like Wells Fargo, have thousands of pages. In most
institutions these pages come from many different servers and many different
applications.
As a minimum, you need to frequently monitor pages that represent
major servers and functionality within your institution's Internet
infrastructure. That said, you need to realize that the fact that one page is
available and performant doesn't mean that others are. If you want to be sure
that your entire site is behaving well, you need to monitor all of it, at least
occasionally.
Your Web site is not a single thing. It is several things that your user
sees as "your" Web site.
If you are like most financial institutions, there is a part that is
information about your institution, your products and services. This part
sits on a server some place that you probably have good control over. But,
there are other parts that you do not control, at least not very well. There
are the parts that you outsource to other providers. Things like check
reordering and credit cards. There are parts of your content proper that get
served from other systems, like promotions or bill presentment and payment.
It's your name on your site. When a user comes to your site, they
experience "your" site. The user does not care what technical and business
arrangements you have with your providers or what different servers you use.
That's your problem. The user cares about the experience they have anywhere
on your site they go. If one of your servers performs poorly or your
business partner is not responsive, your user concludes that your site, all
of it, is poor.
You need to monitor all the parts of your site and the parts of your
business partners site your users use and see as yours.
Your ability to provide financial services reliably and quickly on the
internet is not the only factor in getting and retaining your customers, but
it is a factor, and its importance is increasing.
Increasingly, when a new customer is selecting a financial service
provider, one factor that is considered is the provider's Internet site; is
it always up, is it fast, is it functional, does it meet my needs.
If your competitors do a better job on the Internet than you, it's
important that you know so that you can do something about it.
When it comes to performance, customers don't really compare your site to
some other institution's site. They compare your site to the other Internet
experiences they are having! You need to be as good as Google or Yahoo.
That's why it is important that you know how you are doing against those
other experiences.
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Observations
