Mary Schmidt Marketing Troubleshooter

From NM Biz Weekly: BofA launches new web site to explain banking.

“As part of our ongoing dialogue with customers, we learned that they want clear, straightforward information to help them understand and better manage their accounts,” says Susan Faulkner, BofA deposits executive. “In response, we developed an innovative, interactive one-stop resource that offers relevant information and tips and responds to our customers’ most frequent questions and concerns.”

Marketing bla-blah speak aside - this could be a nice thing to do. Then I visited the site. Wow, BofA spent a ton of money - the first thing you see is a big screen with a commercial playing. Click on another choice - another commercial! You have to go all the way to the bottom to click on one of three buttons (checking & savings, credit cards, FAQs) to get a nav list of choices in text. Then the text pops up over the paused video. I can also, however, enter a choice in “what are you looking for?” at the top - and a whole different set of choices start popping up, including another question for me…while the video keeps playing. Popping, floating, talking, moving - whoaaa, I started getting a little dizzy (I’m only on my first cup of coffee after all.)

Clear? Straightforward? “Interactive?” Well, I guess you can call it interactive if you keep asking people to click, click, click and type in choices…

Looks like two things happened here:

1. Somebody who loves web design had a huge chunk of budget. Unfortunately, they didn’t think through the business goal - or what the customer might like or need to see. (Hint: If a customer is looking for an explanation of an overdraft charge, being forced to watch happy people talking about BofA isn’t going to make them feel good.)

2. In an attempt to avoid direct customer contact ever - the bank crammed every single thing anyone would ever want to know on the site, with a lot of “creative” bells and whistles (and those terrific warm, fuzzy commercials). “Contact us” is at the very bottom…in very little type…in a black bar. Click on that and you get another menu of choices, where if you click on that, you have to type in a location…Really ironic they’ve got those big beautiful happy people videos playing on the site, now isn’ it?

You know what would be great? If the site was very, very simple. Direct contact info on the top of every page, which goes through to a live person. Text that lays out the information very simply, with “got a question?” Call us!” on each page. Of course, this would take time, money, and training, but it could pay off in loyal customers.

Me? I’m sticking with Compass Bank. Despite their crappy web site and email process - they don’t charge me for breathing the air around their ATMs; I can easily check my balances and pay bills online; I can reach the local branch manager (a live person actually answers the phone there too!); and they return my calls. I also don’t need a big honkin’ site to “understand” the fees.