Acting like your brand online

(from Monday Morning)

Risa from Charles Schwab took us through their website redesign, specifically addressing how they designed their website to better reflect their brand (”Talk to Chuck”). They understood their mission to be “making the promise” and “keeping the promise”; that is, the website is a unique combination of both marketing the brand and having people interact with the brand.

Like something we would see later in the day, Charles Schwab took a “know me, then guide me” approach to site navigation by having visitors self-identify based on their needs or demographics, and then putting them on a path to, or within, an area in the site that addresses those needs.

Charles Schwab also recognized that task oriented users know what they want and don’t want or need to be interrupted with marketing messages to get to those areas. The site redesign gave these users more direct access to these tasks right from the homepage (something we’re also trying to do).

Within the pages Charles Schwab found that it was important to put pricing clearly and distinctly right up front – what they call transparent pricing. I’m not sure how important that is to our users, but I think it should be considered.

One nice little feature was the ability of people who had authenticated to quickly get a profile of their account or sales rep. We store information like this in our banking system; it’s not inconcievable to have this information returned after login, with a link to profile and contact information for that employee. We could add business rules to do that only for certain high-value clients, etc. I very cool little feature…

Ed’s unscripted take:

• Some interesting comments regarding client feedback. Risa was particularly keen on ghosting call centre calls to get a sense of real-world customer experience. After spending some time “on the phone” with our call centre during our PAN/Passmark conversion I’ve become a big fan of this myself. I’m thinking of scheduling a one-day a month or quarter “spend day at Call Centre” day just to keep myself better in touch with our end users. This presentation really reinforced the value of that direct feedback, as painful as it often is.
• I wanted to ask Risa to what extent Charles Schwab “gets in front of” clients while they complete their tasks. Our users are so overwhelmingly task oriented (Online Banking) that there’s a sense that that’s really the only time you can market to them, but at the same time you don’t want to get in the way of completing their tasks. We do use a logout page to communicate with them, and side portlets. I think a more aggressive use of messaging might also be effective. I’m wondering whether it’s a balance, or you’re just thankful that they’re using your service in the first place and you leave them alone.
• I’d like to see us integrate pricing better within our content pages. Service charges are there; it would be useful to be able to integrate rates also within the content of pages rather than in portlets to the side.
• The Charles Schwab site is a content rich site, for both authenticated and non-authenticated users. Content – both quality and quantity – remains a real challenge for a credit union our size, that offers substantially the same services as larger competitors but doesn’t have the resources to create and edit the additional content that added value to site visitors. I need to do more thinking around how this might be better facilitated, whether through co-operation, outsourcing, internally created content by diverse users, or something else.