Convert More Business by Reducing Form Abandonment

As financial institutions focus on driving more traffic to their sites, they are missing a very real opportunity to convert more of those visitors into customers. Innovative online marketing techniques have proven effective in generating traffic from targeted audiences, but conversion remains a challenge.

Leading US banks spent more than $300 million last year marketing credit cards online. Despite this investment, the vast majority of visitors abandon the card issuer’s site before completing the application form. Single-digit completion rates are common, which is both a concern—and an opportunity—for financial institutions. The potential upside is compelling for credit cards and other financial products, including mortgages, home equity loans, retirement accounts, insurance and more. A large financial institution that can systematically reduce form abandonment rates across product lines could very well increase revenue by millions of dollars. Even small improvements could yield a significant impact to top-line growth.

Lost Conversion Opportunities

Most online applications closely resemble the complex and confusing paper forms from which they originated. The customer’s experience in completing the application process, however, is very different. In the offline world, a broker or loan officer is often sitting across the table from the mortgage applicant, providing advice, answering questions and otherwise assisting the potential customer to complete the form.

That helpful advice and support is often missing from the online experience. Prospects with questions often have nowhere to turn. Concerns over security and privacy can prompt an online applicant to abandon the form. Confusion over terminology or other product specifics can cause a customer to reconsider. And though many online prospects do complete the application process offline, they may not always transact with the same provider. Financial institutions that do not invest in prospects’ online application experience thus face "leakage" on two fronts—prospects who do not transact at all, and prospects who abandon and transact with a competitor. Financial institutions that rely on FAQs to help prospects complete online applications underestimate how unwieldy and ineffective they can be. To truly improve online conversion rates, banks and other providers must address shortcomings in the application experience so that prospects can complete and submit online applications with confidence.

Intelligence Captured and Delivered

Improving the online application experience requires an integrated knowledge capture and delivery process. First, there must be a better mechanism for consistently capturing and categorizing the organization’s (branch agents, loan officers, call center personnel, etc.) experiences assisting potential customers. Second, there must be a better way to integrate and deliver this critical advice and support knowledge through the online channel, so that prospects who need help or guidance can quickly and easily access the right information when and where they require it. The process needs to be as easy as asking the loan officer a question.

Capturing and categorizing knowledge is the easier part. Many knowledge management software products, including InQuira’s Information Manager, can help financial institutions at this level. The trickier piece is figuring out how to apply the organization’s collective knowledge to the online application process. Integrated chat and other human-to-human applications can help, but those functions are often understaffed and do not always provide the necessary support.

Alternatively, financial institutions should consider "intelligent forms" to assist prospective customers with the online application process. Intelligent forms integrate corporate knowledge with context-sensitive awareness, and can be used to monitor behavior and proactively push content to the applicant when he or she needs it most. For example, intelligent forms can track where the applicant is in the process (page and field), what questions he or she has asked, where the applicant pauses and even flag mistyped information along the way. These and other cues can provide valuable input about where the applicant is having trouble and allow automated, real-time, proactive interventions to address the applicant’s immediate needs.

Target Improvements

Analytics can be used to identify trends contributing to form abandonment, and to identify clusters of applicant questions related by concepts derived from natural language user input. For example, a common question cluster might involve variations on how applicants have expressed security concerns related to entering social security numbers in the online application. In another example, analytics could determine which fields have high abandon rates due to unclear field labeling. These insights can lead to improvements in content and form design, allowing the organization to improve conversion rates and focus resources where they have the most impact.

Narrowing the gap between an organization’s knowledge and a prospect’s online application experience is vital, both in terms of boosting online revenues and in terms of improving customer satisfaction. Ultimately, profits improve and customers get what they want easier and faster than they could before. By gaining a better understanding of what prospects want to do and being able to offer them the support they need to accomplish their objectives, financial institutions can dramatically reduce form abandonment and generate more business through the online channel.

InQuira for Financial Services

• Know more about your customers: Capture intelligence about what your customers want to do;
• Help your customers take action: Offer in-line contextual support to help prospective customers
  complete online application forms; and
• Reap the benefits: Create the right experience for prospects to convert to customers.

A multi-billion-dollar bank recently implemented InQuira and achieved a 28% improvement in completion rates for one of their online applications. This improvement yielded additional revenue of over $240,000 in the first month return on their investment!