2003 Annual Report: Raising the Bar in Product Innovation (Page 4 of 4)

The Best Online Banking Site Gets Even Better

In 2003, active users of our online banking service passed the 7 million mark, more than any other bank. And organizations ranging from Global Finance magazine to Jupiter Research and Nielsen ranked our Web site best-in-class.

Our efforts to improve customer satisfaction resulted in higher growth. We discovered in 2003 that many customers who chose to sign up for online banking were not completing the enrollment process. Research told us why.

In addressing our customers' concerns about security, we had designed online enrollment to rely on account numbers and other identifiers. While these identifiers were less personally sensitive, they were not always readily available when customers were at their computers.

As it turned out, customers were leaving their computers to search for those identifiers. Often, they never returned to complete their enrollments. Interviews revealed that in addition to security, customers value a simple enrollment process.

Based on this research, we switched to identifiers that most consumers have memorized, and we upgraded our security procedures while simplifying the process from five screens to one. As a result, the enrollment success rate increased 23%, totalling 100,000 completed enrollments per month. We also saw our costs go down because customers didn't need to call for help as often.

Then we took the next step and simplified the online bill payment process, reducing the number of screen fields by half, which helped to increase use of the service by 84% in 2003.