Design More Trust Into Interactions

The rise of phishing attacks and other forms of online fraud has heightened consumers' concerns about the security of their personal information. As a result, it's important for firms to address these concerns with every interaction.

To understand how effective financial services firms are at designing trust-building practices into digital interactions, we examined the results from expert reviews recently completed by Forrester. On average, the firms failed nearly all trust criteria in our evaluations. While there wasn't a large number of evaluations to analyze, the results highlight problems across several interaction channels:

Web sites failed five of six trust criteria. The biggest problems: poor contextual help and missing links to privacy and security policies.

Emails failed all trust criteria. The biggest problems: missing privacy policies and message headers that did not provide value.

Phone self-service failed all trust criteria. The biggest problem: Systems didn't help users recover from errors.

Kiosk software failed three of four trust criteria. The biggest problems: The systems didn't provide enough feedback and didn't help users recover from errors.

Building trust with customers and prospects is too important to leave to chance. That's why firms need to explicitly focus on trust-building principles whenever they design or evaluate customer interactions. Here are some design principles that should be applied to all self-service interactons:

• Be clear about privacy and security policies. During important transactions, users shouldn't have to go hunting for privacy information. Firms should provide users with in-context links to clearly written privacy and security policies when and where they are asked for personal information.

• Anticipate questions, and let users get answers in context. Designers should anticipate target customers' questions through analytics tools and other data sources like frequently asked questions in contact center logs. Map those queries back to specific areas, and place answers where customers may have questions.

• Help users avoid -- and recover from -- errors. Firms need to seek out instances in which errors can occur -- like a form in which users can make errors like inputting the wrong email address. If possible, redesign the interaction to prevent errors. If that's not possible, make sure error messages explain to users how to recover from the problem.

• Treat interactions as part of a dialogue. Interactions that take place between a human and a computer are conversations, and they should be designed that way -- not as static Web pages, kiosk screens, emails, or IVR prompts.

• Customer experience reviews. We can evaluate the usability of your Web sites, emails, and phone apps.

• Web site assessments. We can compare the features on your site with those of your competitors' sites.

• Market research. We can provide insights on consumers from our existing Consumer Technographics® data or through customized research.

• Online activity benchmarking. Compare your firm's online efforts with that of other banks and credit unions. We are also kicking off a multiclient research project on organizational models and staffing levels.

Research Referenced In This Issue Amdocs Dynamic Banking: An Approach To Watch (38982) Bank Web Sites Impact Customer Relationships (38525) Financial Services Firms Need To Design For Trust (38838) GMAC's Deal Management iDEAL: A Content-Centric Application (39034) How Should IT Providers Attack The Insurance Market? Think SOA (39096) Social Computing (38772) The Demise Of The One-Stop-Shop Brokerage (38995) The Forrester Wave™ 2005 (36769) The Forrester Wave™: BI Reporting And Analysis Platforms, Q1 2006 (38354) The Forrester Wave™: Database Marketing Service Providers, Q1 2006 (37150) The Forrester Wave™: Enterprise Marketing Platforms, Q1 2006 (37151) The Forrester Wave™: Human-Centric Business Process Management Suites, Q1 2006 (36942) The Forrester Wave™: P&C Claims Platform, Q4 2005 (37160) The Forrester Wave™: SOA And Web Services Management, Q1 2006 (36928) The Forrester Wave™: Web Analytics, Q1 2006 (36675) Trends 2006: Online Banking Retail Customer Authentication In Europe (39058) Trends 2006: Retail Financial Services (38704) UK Online Investing Forecast: 2006 To 2011 (38045) Who Researches And Buys Credit Cards Online? (39017)

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