Five ways to optimise UX when conducting financial checks
Previously in this series we’ve talked about changing the culture, we’ve looked at how to phrase your all important player communications, and even precisely what information you should ask for.
All that means that of those customers who are required to perform financial checks, the highest percentage possible are going to arrive at stage one of the process. You have managed to persuade them, in other words, to at least give it a shot.
What happens now will make or break the success of your program. And the good news is, we can help. Read on.
A brief recap
Before going any further let’s just remind ourselves what we are trying to achieve here. If you are an operator currently asking customers to perform any sort of compliance check in which financial data is shared, the percentage of those customers who complete those checks is a very important number.
The factors that contribute to that number are multiple, and moving that number means looking at every angle of the process. Hence this series of articles, and the following advice about optimising the customer experience to ensure the highest percentage of customers who START this journey by clicking on an email (or an SMS, or in-app message…) also FINISH the journey by clicking submit when they have shared that data.
Let’s get into it
Five ways to make sharing financial data easy
There are an almost infinite number of observations we could make here about usability engineering and user-centred design. Trust us, if you had ever met our Head of Product Rob you would be well aware that this is a conversation with no apparent end. And nor should it be: fundamentally the job is to make things as easy as possible, and following the principles of good usability, including user testing, will get you a long way. But with all that said, here we will pick out five things we do believe every organization should do, or not do.
These don’t include “use Open Banking”. We mentioned this in a previous post, and we don’t think it is worth going over again: it should be taken as read. If you are not already committed to an Open Banking journey rather than asking for physical bank statements, or other irrelevant documentation, you really should change that before going further.
But when you are ready:
1. Look the part
As everybody should be aware by now, you are asking people to share sensitive financial information. Many of those people are rightly protective of that data, and they are entitled to be nervous about who they share it with.
With that in mind take plenty of time to look the part. A slapdash, shonky user interface will reduce the user’s trust in the entire process, and you will pay the price. Don’t compromise. As our CEO Martin Burt says (sometimes too often for comfort) “a great UI should feel positively lickable”. That may be an eccentric way of putting it, but he’s right: give nobody any reason to distrust the experience you present to them.