Financial institutions (FIs) collectively spend many billions of dollars each year on advertising, promoting their brands to hopefully grow their customer base.
Marketers evaluate the success of these campaigns by looking at the ROI of their advertising spend. It’s ultimately a very simple formula: How much did you spend and how much did you get in return. But the factors that determine the success of the return? Those are plentiful.
The most common way ROI is improved for advertising campaigns is more effective and targeted ads. Getting more of the right people to visit your website is certainly a great way to improve the ROI of your marketing efforts. But what happens after a prospect lands on your website? Too often, whether or not that individual becomes a paying customer is left up to a self-service experience that lacks personalization.
One of the most effective ways to increase the success of your marketing spend and drive new business, is to improve the percentage of visitors to your sales funnel that convert into a customer. Pairing an intuitive, effortless self-service experience with personalized, on-screen support will reduce the amount that abandon your site and ultimately increase the number of successful applications.
Challenges of Self-Service Applications
The introduction of online applications, such as loan applications or car insurance quotes, has enabled consumers to self-serve. And for FIs, it’s enabled them to sell more without always requiring human assistance. It’s generally been a win-win for both parties.
The problem is that the online experience has put the onus on the consumer to complete the application, and it’s left FIs at the mercy of consumer behavior. In instances where a prospective customer has hit a friction point and is at risk of abandoning the form, most companies have no means of reaching out and regaining the user’s interest. Many FIs aren’t even aware of exactly where in the process they’re losing customers.
Picture a scenario where someone is shopping for a car insurance policy. They go to an insurance carrier’s website and begin the process of submitting for a quote. They’re halfway through the form when they encounter a coverage question they’re unsure how to answer. In most cases they have two options:
- Search for a customer service phone number, wait on hold, and then explain where they are in the process (effectively starting all over again)
- Abandon their progress, likely to not return again
For financial institutions, these scenarios are all too common. But Glia is helping FIs to combat high abandonment rates and improve online conversions.
Tactics for Improving Online Conversions
Let’s revisit the previous scenario of a consumer halfway through completing a car insurance quote. When they hit that friction point and need assistance on a coverage question, providing Digital Customer Service options, such as chat, OnScreen Voice, or video can keep the customer on screen. Further, they can easily be routed to the appropriate department based on the form they’re completing, eliminating the need for transfers and additional wait time.
While providing interaction options within the online form is crucial to reducing abandonments, companies leveraging the Glia platform can go a step further to improve conversions.
By monitoring the digital behavior of consumers on these pages, organizations can proactively reach out before consumers abandon the form. This can be done in a number of ways, based on the business rules a FI sets up.
For instance, a company could proactively pop up a message that an expert is available to assist if there’s been inactivity on the page for a preset period of time. The company could also have the text for the digital engagement bubble change to a custom message depending on what the consumer is hovering over with their mouse. This can be particularly useful when a consumer first lands on the website and is scrolling through different offerings.
Once engaged with a prospective customer, FIs have additional options to improve the customer experience by making it more efficient and personalized. Collaboration tools, such as CoBrowsing, enable reps to assist consumers through the complex portions of an application.
Combining these interaction tools, along with business logic to reduce abandonments, is the key for FIs to get the most out of their marketing spend and grow their business.
One of Glia’s customers, Experian Insurance Services, has shared their story on how leveraging the Glia Interaction Platform has enhanced their online insurance shopping experience. Here’s an excerpt from their success story:
Through the data they’ve collected and their observations, they’ve determined the ideal times within the application process to serve the proactive bubble—either by page or amount of time without activity. For example, if someone filling out the application has paused on a question for 15 seconds, Experian Insurance Services can leverage business rules to surface the chat bubble, alerting the consumer that they can engage digitally to have their question resolved.
Read the full case study with Experian Insurance Services to learn more about how the company has leveraged the Glia Interaction Platform to improve its online conversions.
