• E-mail
• Print
• Comment
• Font Size
• Digg
• del.icio.us
• Discuss article

Bank Relies on Customer Insight to Develop Online Product for Businesses

Posted on: Friday, 31 March 2006, 06:00 CST

By Anonymous

Several years ago when Huntington National Bank, Columbus, Ohio, prepared to update its business website-called Business Online-it decided to do it in-house. One reason the conversion was a success was because the bank used extensive customer feedback in the form of both testing and focus groups, according to Pamela Erickson, vice president and manager of the bank's Business Online team.

"Once we determined no vendor solution could be customized to meet the high expectations of our Web team and existing customers, we chose to develop a new online product from the ground up, involving customer feedback from the outset to ensure the site would be popular with both our existing and new customers," she says.

Huntington National has assets of $32.1 billion.

Prior to the upgrade, the bank provided basic online services to business customers using an older platform. The financial institution had not previously tackled an online project of this magnitude; but, while building the case for the business site upgrade, the bank's Web team successfully launched a consumer site. With this proven expertise, the team determined it could offer upgraded online service to business customers without outside vendors.

In the past, the bank routinely created a pilot group to review any online content before posting it. For the development of Business Online, the bank dramatically expanded the customer testing process to involve stakeholders from the beginning. "Following this pilot model, our Web team worked with a cross-section of representative business customers who we eventually involved in focus group testing to review the proposed site and provide input," says Erikson.

From the project's early stages, the bank worked several companies to obtain feedback about the initial design plan, before even developing the prototype. Following the development of prototype content, the bank team went back to selected members of the pilot group to conduct virtual focus-group testing, providing tasks for them to conduct in the online test environment from their respective workplaces.

The usability studies, in which the bank team viewed participants working with a facilitator through a one-way mirror, proved invaluable in the final packaging of the product.

The facilitator had approximately 12 bank customers, ranging from small to large businesses, asking them several questions regarding the new system. "We could not only observe the ease with which our customers could perform specific functions, but also note instances in which language choices caused user difficulty. This allowed us to address any issues in our final prelaunch revisions," says Erikson.

Dania Kraus, treasury associate with the Morgantown, W.Va., office of Canonsburg, Pa.-based Mylan Laboratories, says Mylan valued the opportunity to provide input. The company was one of the largest involved in the system design. "A lot of the requests for recommendations that we had for system upgrades were incorporated," Kraus says. "They contacted us and said: This is what we're going to do; do you think this is going to support what you want?" Kraus says the ability to create and adjust reports and obtain detailed transaction information were the primary upgrades Mylan wanted that have been implemented into the new system. Testing "worked very well- we had no further changes or recommendations" after reviewing the site offline, Kraus says.

Erikson says that the individuals chosen for pilot testing were very vocal throughout the design and development process. "This input has not only led to satisfaction in our existing customer base of 4,000 but an unexpectedly high sign-up rate of more than 3,100 new customers-vastly exceeding our goal of 1,000 new customers in the first year of the new product following our May (2005) launch."

Hunting National Bank, Columbus Ohio, used extensive customer feedback to update its business website, which is named Business Online (sample pages from the online demo are shown at the right). The work was done completely in-house.

Huntington is averaging about 150 new users a week which is expected to slow slightly to 100 a week in 2006, with continued growth augmented by direct mail to 14,000 potential smallbusiness customers.

"By building and running our online systems on the same platform, we are excited about the potential for future enhancements applying improvements from varying lines of business within our bank," says Erikson. "Our business system is the third channel connecting to the same back-end site, and we anticipate continuing to add services from lines that are not yet online. By doing it ourselves, the enhancements will be much easier to add: this is the beauty of what we have built."

Copyright Bank Marketing Association Mar 2006

Source: ABA Bank Marketing

More News in this Category