How Abandonment Retargeting Can Positively Impact Financial Institutions

Today the industry has about an 80 percent abandonment rate for fulfillment functions. Besides being enormously costly, it generates customer dissatisfaction, resulting in a diminished reputation.

Digital technology can detect issues and proactively assist with both automated and human-based interventions. Omni-channel fulfillment detects issues in three main categories:

1. Navigational – In today’s digital world, banks and credit unions know about the user’s expected journey and behavior by the way they navigate through the website and the fulfillment process, which enables the institution to “sense” irregularities.
2. Time-based- One of the best indicators of user behavior is time-on-page. The purpose and design elements of the webpage, such as informational, educational, or data collection, inherently tell us how long the user should be on the page before another navigational element is performed.
3. Issue detection - System-type errors and failures preventing process execution are part of this. Errors include erratic behavior (outside the norm) or unsuccessful navigation attempts indicating that the user is confused.

It is important to not only proactively detect but also proactively intervene using automated and human-powered methods based on the type of issue detected and the consumer’s contact preference. Intervention is often a quick, automated method providing contextual information to the user. In some cases, human intervention is needed to help complete the process or to take ownership of the process if the user prefers. The goal is to offer the user immediate solutions to keep the application process moving forward. Without such actions, abandonment rates increase, which can be costly for financial institutions.

The ability to successfully execute abandonment retargeting can bring monetary benefits to banks and credit unions. Let’s take a case of 1,000 new account attempts. Using abandonment rates we see commonly in the industry today means that you have 800 abandoned, and only 200 are finalized. Instantly, you’ve not only lost 800 possible accounts but also any new customers associated with them, and worse, you have a diminished reputation with them. We can now monetize the impact using an industry average annual per account value of $500. Let’s assume you target and capture 30 percent of the abandonments with quick consumer recovery and engagement. So, 30 percent times 800 lost opportunities yield an added 240 new accounts and the related new customers, and at $500 per account, that’s an additional $120,000 revenue just from abandonment detection, recovery, and retargeting per 1,000 attempts.

For more information, download the Omni-Channel Fulfillment interview document.