New York, NY—March 20, 2024— Retailers have a key opportunity as they face soaring costs on ecommerce’s most critical acquisition channels, Meta and Google, which have driven up costs per visit by 12.4%–above average by 3%-according to Contentsquare’s new 2024 Retail Digital Experience Benchmark Report. The report highlights influential data and actionable insights retailers can take to meet their customers where they are. Although retailers are hit the hardest, they also have a massive opportunity when considering traffic and revenue trends, especially on mobile, which has become the leading source for ecommerce traffic globally (77%) and accounting for 56% of revenues. With investments in digital customer experience, data shows retailers can experience massive gains in customer retention, conversion, and loyalty.   

“Consumers are strongly voicing their preferences, but data shows brands still have room to meet their expectations. How does that translate to business impact? What brands are losing by not improving customer experience is material, and business leaders need to ask themselves how they can capitalize on understanding customer preferences in order to deliver value,” said Jean-Christophe Pitié, Chief Marketing and Partnerships Officer, Contentsquare. “The data demonstrates a missed opportunity for brands on mobile. It’s clear that they need to evolve the way they think about mobile and optimize the entire mobile journey, not simply the pages or formatting, so it’s imperative to create more seamless experiences.”

Key Data and Takeaways for Brands:

• Despite the growth in mobile traffic share, conversion rates fell 5.8% as shoppers tend to make shorter, micro-visits while using mobile devices, and spend 60% less time per session viewing fewer pages than on desktop.
• Easy-to-remedy frustrations, including slow page loads and poor visitor responses, reduced revenue by $0.56 per visit.
  • Retailers can combat frustration by combining audience insights with proactive monitoring to consistently deliver experiences that delight their customers.
• “Growth at all costs” is outdated.
  • Instead of focusing simply on driving traffic, retailers need to shift their focus to improving the overall customer experience in order to drive profitability.  
• Conversions are 77% higher on desktop than on mobile
• Retail traffic is increasingly dependent on paid, as opposed to organic, sources, with paid driving 42.6% of visits and nearly half (47.8%) of all new visits to ecommerce sites.
  • Instead of chasing higher traffic volume, retailers’ best acquisition strategy may be a retention strategy. Knowing what constitutes an engaging, satisfying experience which encourages customers to stay, convert, and return is key.
• Apps provide a unique opportunity for retailers and they provide a critical role in delivering the returning customer experience, attracting nearly 4X the share of returning visitors compared with mobile web, according to Contentsquare’s 2024 Digital Experience Benchmark Report.
  • Although apps are typically positioned as a means to foster strong relationships with existing customers, brands were able to expand the breadth of their audience using apps last year – new visitors accounted for 15% of all app visits, up from 10% the prior year.

Download the full report here. 

# # #

Methodology

The Retail Digital Experience Benchmark is a set of aggregated and anonymized insights of digital performance. Strict aggregation measures are employed to ensure anonymity. These measures include requirements on analysis set size, diversity, and consistency, in order to present credible and reliable information that is insulated from concentration risk.

To qualify for inclusion in the year-over-year analysis, each site must have operated throughout the entire analysis period, in this case October 2022 through December 2023. Frustration analyses are calculated for October 2023. All year-over-year analyses are Q4 2023 / Q4 2022. All other analyses represent Q4 2023. Additional data hygiene factors are applied to ensure accurate metric calculation. Additional data hygiene factors are applied to ensure accurate metric calculation.

This edition of the Retail Digital Experience Benchmark analyzed more than 25 billion sessions and 130 billion page views across 1,673 websites. 

About Contentsquare

Contentsquare delivers the power to make the digital world more human. Its AI-powered platform provides rich and contextual insight into customer behaviors, feelings and intent — at every touchpoint in their journey — enabling businesses to build empathy and create lasting impact. The global leader in digital experience analytics, Contentsquare helps brands everywhere transform the way they do business, allowing them to take action at enterprise scale and build customer trust with security, privacy, and accessibility. More than 1,000 leading brands use Contentsquare to grow their business, deliver more customer happiness and move with greater agility in a constantly changing world. Its insights power the customer experience on over 1 million websites worldwide. For more information, visit www.contentsquare.com

Media Contact:

Erica Ashner

Erica.Ashner@Contentsquare.com

The post Retail Sees Shift to Mobile Driving More than Half of Revenue and Nearly 80% of Traffic, According to New Report appeared first on Contentsquare.

New York, NY—February 14, 2024 —Digital ad spend is set to surpass $740 billion in 2024, yet website traffic, consumption and conversion were all down last year, according to the Contentsquare 2024 Digital Experience Benchmark Report. In fact, 55% of all sites saw lower traffic, 58% saw session consumption fall, and conversion decreased by 5.5% according to the report. Contentsquare, a global leader in digital experience analytics, also found that 40% of all online visits included avoidable friction, including technical website errors, slow page loads and rage clicks. 

“With a dip in global web traffic this year and the cost per visit rising almost 10%, making every visit count is business critical,” said Jean-Christophe Pitié, Chief Marketing and Partnerships Officer, Contentsquare. “We know from our previous consumer research that shoppers are leaving sites as a result of frustrations that could be easily resolved, such as slow page loads and rage clicks.”

While fixing frustration remains an utmost priority across industries, efforts to optimize mobile app performance are paying off, with apps recording steady customer engagement in 2023 (14 pages viewed per online visit up from 13.8 the previous year) and a conversion rate of 5.6% — 3x the conversion rate of mobile web traffic. Furthermore, app users spend 64% more time in-app than visitors spend on mobile sites.

Mobile, in particular, is the new competitive battlefield. We’ve seen gains in terms of engagement for apps this year, but mobile optimization as a whole is not as mature as it could be given the intelligence we have today on customer behaviors and preferences.

Jean-Christophe Pitié, Chief Marketing and Partnerships Officer, Contentsquare

Contentsquare’s latest Benchmark Report further revealed:

Mobile Visits Are Micro-Visits 

Despite mobile driving 70% of website traffic in Q4 2023, browsing time on mobile web is 60% shorter than on desktop. These “micro-visits” contribute to a decline in conversion rates, highlighting the gap between consumer expectations and current mobile web optimization practices.

A Shift to Paid Sources, With Search Driving 4x Conversion of Paid Social

Paid sources drove one-third of all traffic to websites this year, and 36% of new visits. For mobile web, paid sources account for 40% of traffic — twice as much as for desktop. While overall traffic is down, paid social is one of the few channels that saw traffic growth in 2023. However, social traffic struggles to convert compared to paid search, which still drives 4x the conversion rate of paid social. The report indicated that visits from social are less intentional, with a 41% higher bounce rate than paid search. Visitors from social may have inadvertently tapped through to a website because of a compelling story or influencer without the intention embodied by visitors coming from paid search.

The High Cost of Frustration

Frustrating visitors is a surefire way to waste visits. Sites that are slow to load (those taking more than three seconds) and perform poorly in responding to visitor interactions combine to reduce the engagement by 15%.

Rage clicks (clicking at least three times in less than two seconds) continue to frustrate visitors, and were found in 5.5% of all online visits. 

To learn more, download the full Benchmark report here.

# # #

Methodology

This edition of the Digital Experience Benchmark analyzed more than 43 billion sessions and 200 billion page views across 3,590 websites.

The 10 industries analyzed include: 

• Consumer Packaged goods
• Energy, Utilities, & Construction
• Financial Services
• Manufacturing
• Media
• Retail
• Services
• Software
• Travel & Hospitality
• Telecommunications

The Digital Experience Benchmark is a set of aggregated and anonymized insights into digital performance. Strict aggregation measures are employed to ensure anonymity. These measures include requirements on analysis set size, diversity, and consistency, to present credible and reliable information that is insulated from concentration risk. 

To qualify for inclusion in the year-over-year analysis, each site must have operated throughout the entire analysis period, in this case, October 2022 through December 2023. For current period analysis, the analysis period is Q4 2023. Additional hygiene factors are applied to ensure accurate metric calculation.

About Contentsquare

Contentsquare is a leading digital experience analytics platform that empowers businesses to understand and optimize the user experience across web, mobile, and app platforms. Its AI-powered platform provides rich and contextual insight into customer behaviors, feelings and intent — at every touchpoint in their journey — enabling businesses to build empathy and create lasting impact. More than 1,300 leading brands use Contentsquare to grow their business, deliver more customer happiness and move with greater agility in a constantly changing world. Its insights are used to optimize the experience on over 1.3 million websites worldwide. Founded in Paris and with offices around the world, Contentsquare is backed by leading high quality investors, including funds and accounts managed by BlackRock, Bpifrance, Canaan, Eurazeo, Highland Europe, KKR, LionTree, Sixth Street and SoftBank Vision Fund 2. For more information, visit www.contentsquare.com.

Media Contact:

Contentsquare

Erica Ashner

erica.ashner@contentsquare.com 

The post Nearly Sixty Percent of Brands See Drop in Online Traffic and Consumption in 2023, According to New Report appeared first on Contentsquare.

About Carlos and StoneX’s website relaunch

As the Head of Digital Experience at StoneX, Carlos Ma and his team are responsible for optimizing the digital experience of the company’s retail and commercial clients.

StoneX, a Fortune 100, Nasdaq-listed company, is celebrating its centenary this year, and it recently launched a new brand website to help seamlessly connect its clients to the major global financial markets.

What are your key challenges and priorities?

For StoneX, optimizing cross-channel customer experiences across product teams can be a challenge.

“Given that each product has its own roadmap and priorities, being able to quantify the impact and demonstrate the potential ROI becomes crucial when deciding what to optimize,” explains Carlos.

“My personal priority is to provide an open and safe environment for the team to think creatively about how we can deliver the best digital experience for our clients.”
– Carlos Ma

What stood out to you most about Contentsquare?

When StoneX launched its rebranded corporate website (www.stonex.com) to provide a streamlined platform for connecting clients with StoneX solutions and services experts, the company needed a digital experience solution that would help with website analysis—and ultimately drive business growth.

“When we were looking for a solution, our Head of Websites Marina Muncescu, who had met Contentsquare at a CX event, recommended that we take a look at the platform,” Carlos says.

“The visual representation of client engagement metrics and the ability to segment client session replays to gain insights from clients’ interactions on the website were particularly valuable features for us, and really stood out as potentially offering a lot of value.”

“Contentsquare empowers us to gather valuable customer insights, enabling us to optimize the user experience and drive business growth.”

– Carlos Ma

What are your favorite features so far, and which features are you most looking forward to using?

Carlos explains that Contentsquare has already been successfully implemented across the majority of StoneX’s public websites, encompassing both B2C and B2B platforms.

He cites his favorite feature so far as CS Live, because “it’s an excellent starting point for someone new to Contentsquare or for demonstrating to stakeholders how easy it is to draw engagement data within just a few clicks, something that was previously not possible.”

And this is just the beginning:

“We are continuously expanding Contentsquare’s reach by integrating into StoneX’s digital properties, enabling us to capture the full end-to-end customer digital journey,” Carlos says.

“Thanks to the integration between Contentsquare and our Google Analytics, we discovered some of our MetaTrader clients were trying to log in using our proprietary platform login window, which had been causing some frustration.”
– Carlos Ma

Which teams will be getting their hands on the platform?

Carlos’ digital experience team is driving Contentsquare’s adoption within the organization: “We’re working closely with Contensquare’s experts to maximize the tool’s potential,” he says.

“A diverse group of web editors, marketing specialists, copywriters, designers and UX/UI experts are also regular users of Content Square, contributing to its widespread adoption and success,” Carlos adds.

“Contentsquare empowers us to realize our inspiration of delivering exceptional digital experience, seamlessly connecting clients to the markets that they seek.” —Carlos Ma

If you were to recommend Contentsquare to a contact in the industry, what would you say?

“Contentsquare is a powerful UX analytics tool that helps companies to become more data-driven when optimizing their digital experience. It’s easy to use and integrates well with most mainstream technologies in the market. At StoneX, we provide comprehensive market intelligence insights to our customers. Data is a powerful driver for both our business and our clients’ businesses and helps us to make more informed decisions.”

Carlos is also impressed with the support offered by Contentsquare, which he describes as “exceptional” and “second to none.”

“The accounts manager and customer success team have been instrumental in supporting us to drive wider adoption of the platform. They are consistently prompt when addressing queries. They proactively share platform updates and provide relevant use cases to inspire our team to extract valuable insights,” he says.

The post Why StoneX chose Contentsquare to ensure website relaunch success appeared first on Contentsquare.

Part of enabling that great experience is experimentation. Experimentation helps identify what works best, enabling personalization while fostering innovation. This iterative process ultimately enhances long-term loyalty and helps brands maintain a competitive edge in the digital landscape.

What is an “experimentation platform” ?

An experimentation platform is a digital tool or system that enables organizations to conduct controlled tests and experiments to optimize various aspects of their operations. It provides a structured environment to test hypotheses, analyze data, and make informed decisions based on the results. This platform typically allows users to design experiments, define variables, set up control groups, and measure outcomes in a controlled and efficient manner. The goal is to gain insights into user behavior, product performance, or any other relevant metrics, ultimately leading to data-driven improvements and enhancements across products, services, or processes.

Interview with nib on the importance of understanding the customer journey and how they’re driving experimentation with Contentsquare 

nib is one of Australia’s leading insurance brands, providing health and medical insurance to over 1.6 million Australian and New Zealand resident, in addition, to over 200,000 international workers and students who rely on nib for their health insurance cover. Today they also provide travel insurance, and they support almost 40,000 participants in Australia’s National Disability Insurance Scheme.  nib’s mission is to support the better health and wellbeing of its members, participants and travellers. They aim to do this by enabling access to a wide ecosystem of “personalised” products, programs and healthcare services to complement our private health insurance, all available on their content-rich digital platform.

It goes without saying that an intuitive platform is crucial in enabling visitors to navigate through all that information and finding what they need easily. 

We sit down with Clare Powell, nib’s Senior Manager Digital Growth and Performance to learn more about how they’re using digital experience analytics platform Contentsquare to help them better understand the customer journey and drive experimentation programs to improve the digital experience. 

Hi, please introduce yourself

My name is Clare, and I’m the Senior Manager Digital Growth and Performance at nib. I’m responsible primarily for growing website leads and website sales. On a day-to-day basis, I lookafter the digital analytics function of the website, as well as experimentation and A/B testing, and optimising the online experience. 

What are some of the key challenges you face when it comes to the digital experience?

Where we were struggling is we had a lot of data that told us what was happening, but not why. For example, we would look at a certain page and could see that visitors weren’t doing what we wanted them to, but didn’t understand why this was the case. We were doing a lot of guesswork in terms of what were the next steps, or what we should optimise next. 

How does Contentsquare help to solve these challenges? 

How do I put into words, my love for this platform? 

We were using Universal Analytics prior, and some of our teams were having trouble using that to gather insights . Now that [we have Contentsquare], we’ve got for example, content editors who are able to go[into the platform] and access very granula data. 

And I think that granular detail is the key benefit. At a page level, it’s not just how the page is performing overall – it’s getting into the nitty gritty of the individual elements, including “the why”. We’re not just able to understand who’s clicking on what, but we’re able to get metrics like attractiveness, rate, exposure which gives us a holistic view. 

When it comes to customer journey mapping, Google Analytics makes it very easy to build out a funnel or a journey path, but these are journeys you need to plan for. 

That’s the appeal of that sunburst diagram that Contentsquare has – it uncovers journeys that we didn’t know about. 

Can you share an instance where you saw results from your experiments with Contentsquare?

We use Optimizely as our experimentation tool, and the results can sometimes be quite topline. There have been instances when we combined those results with Contentsquare and were able to gain context to the data, which led us down a better and more informed direction in terms of the next steps. 

A current experiment we’re working on is our filter bar. You can filter by your life stage, state and what you want your health insurance premium excess to be. We tested adding an income filter, which gives you a more accurate quote. Optimizely showed us that the segment of visitors who saw the income filter bar converted less. From these initial findings, we thought that inputting income causes the price to jump, which then causes potential customers to abandon their journey because they’re after the lowest price. 

What we were able to drill into with Contentsquare was to understand the difference between the segment of users who saw the filter bar and interacted with it, vs those who saw it but didn’t interact with it. What we actually found was the opposite of our initial thoughts on the user experience, and instead, we found that the people who were interacting with the filter bar actually converted quite a bit higher than those who weren’t.

Our hypothesis is no longer price shock, but now around, how can we better place the element? Or how can we better explain the benefit of filling in the income field so your quote is more accurate? 

What other teams at nib use Contentsquare? 

So we’ve got, my team, that is, the digital growth and performance team. And then we’ve got our IT team, where our UX designers sit. DevOps use it to look for errors, as well as our content and marketing teams who look after our blog & general information pages and who also track customer journeys on marketing landing pages. We have regular meetings with these teams for ideation sessions from the insights we collect from Contentsquare, and to better understand as an organisation what worked, and what didn’t to help guide the next steps or inspire new experiments. 

What made you choose Contentsquare? 

It was really how easy the UI was for us. Knowing that we didn’t have a lot of resources, we needed a platform that enabled as much self-service as possible. We also needed a platform that would seamlessly fit in with Tealium, and as we’re in the finance space, we needed something that met all risk, compliance and security requirements. 

It would be hard to ever go back now that we’ve used Contentsquare!

Finally, why do you think it’s important for brands to care about the digital experience? 

I think the digital experience is everything, and it’s becoming the voice of the brand. In the old days, it might be a TV advertisement that would set the tone of what your brand is. Whereas now, people typically first encounter your brand after they Google it. 

There’s also a theory that if your website is really hard to use, there’s a psychological assumption that dealing with the company will also be hard. And, this is especially so with a product like private health insurance, where it’s a long-term product. It’s not like you’re buying a pair of shoes, where you may be able to tolerate a clunky platform for the short term. With insurance, it’s something that you may have for the rest of your life and will make multiple transactions for. So, you need that experience to be as simple and intuitive as possible.

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The post How nib uses Contentsquare to understand the customer journey and drive experimentation appeared first on Contentsquare.

Contact centers have proven invaluable in providing personalized service without the need for customers to visit a branch. However, we can also observe the significant costs associated with contact centers in the banking sector. Digital banking strategy rise has amplified the demand for self-service options, catering to customer preferences.

Today, we focus on the pivotal role of digital channels in enabling efficient and high-quality contact center experiences. These channels serve as crucial tools that, when not seamlessly executed, can lead to significant financial losses and a decrease in customer count. A frictionless digital experience is key to maximizing contact center efficiency and fostering lasting customer relationships.

Reduce call volumes. Prioritize Digital for Customer Actions and Empower Self-Service

Digital is undeniably the most cost-effective way of serving customers, and we mustn’t overlook this fact. On average, the cost of service using digital channels is estimated around 0.1 USD. However, failing to provide customers with the online capabilities they expect could lead to costly calls, averaging above 6 USD per interaction.

But it’s not just about cost savings; digital is also the preferred option for 75% of users when it comes to low-touch interactions. Customers seek to access information and perform basic transactions without the need for human intervention, such as transfers, checking balances, or updating account details.

When information is readily available and easily accessible online, unnecessary calls can be avoided. Take, for instance, Leeds Building Society, which saw a remarkable 40% increase in conversion rates by enhancing how users accessed product information and enabling comparisons through Contentsquare.

Failing to meet customer information needs leaves them with two unfavourable options: abandoning the interaction or resorting to calling for assistance. Both scenarios can harm your business.

Moreover, self-service adoption in financial services has experienced a staggering 5.4x growth rate for the last few years, showcasing the unique opportunity that digital banking strategy presents. It’s not just about offering basic activities through digital channels; it’s about delivering them with peak performance. Poor performance in digital banking would only lead to an influx of unnecessary calls to the contact center for support. 

See how your digital experience stacks up.

Download the 2023 Financial Services Digital Experience Benchmark report.

Get my free copy

If you want to reduce call volume in your contact centers, it’s crucial to ensure that digital channels enable customers to perform expected tasks effortlessly and seamlessly. Embracing digital and delivering a top-notch user experience will undoubtedly be a game-changer for your business.

Faster call resolution. Empowering Contact Centers and enhancing efficiency with a good digital banking strategy

For those customer activities that require human agent support, contact centers can leverage digital channels and tools to streamline call times and deliver top-notch service. The ultimate aim is to create a system where customers call when they need to, and agents are equipped with the context to provide the best possible assistance swiftly and efficiently.

Now, the burning question is, how can digital channels reduce agent-customer interaction time without compromising service quality? Let’s explore a couple of examples.

1. Use digital to minimize Bureaucracy Through Online Prequalification:

Due to regulatory constraints, only a select few products can be sold entirely online. Additionally, many customers feel more comfortable seeking human assistance after conducting their preliminary research. Take, for instance, mortgage applications; customers not only seek information but also need to provide certain details before engaging in a conversation.

Mortgage calculators are a valuable tool that allows potential customers to assess their eligibility and offer preliminary information. By increasing the success rate of customers filling out mortgage applications online, resolution times can be reduced significantly. Agents no longer need to re-ask basic questions, saving time and enabling them to delve deeper into customers’ needs and preferences. This enhanced context helps agents qualify customers better and identify the right products to offer. Natwest serves as an excellent example, as they improved their mortgage calculator conversion rates through meticulous attention to digital experience, driving substantial additional revenue (£500k per annum in their case).

2. When jumping from digital to contact center, provide context for efficient customer support:

Digital channels sometimes lead customers to encounter various frictions along the way. Technical issues or challenges in understanding how to proceed may prompt customers to call the contact center seeking support. In these cases, integrating tools like Voice of Customer with Digital Experience platforms can be game-changers. These tools offer agents the necessary context and information to comprehend the customer’s experience and serve them better. For customers, this means not having to recount their frustrating experiences, reducing additional frustration, and allowing agents to quickly grasp the situation without solely relying on the customer’s ability to explain the issue.

In both of these scenarios, the common goal is crystal clear: empowering agents with the tools they need to proactively and efficiently assist customers. By leveraging the full potential of digital channels and investing in a customer-centric approach, contact centers can elevate their performance, foster customer satisfaction, and drive sustainable business growth.

Increase customer satisfaction. Successful digital experience retain customers, but bad digital experiences will push them away

In contact centers, dealing with frustrated customers is a common challenge. Unsatisfied customers are more likely to switch banks, as the Digital Banking Report reveals that 76% of customers would switch due to multiple bad service experiences.

For customers, nothing is more exasperating than being forced into human interaction when they desire a fully digital experience. Such an action alone can cause a staggering 36-point drop in your NPS score.

This level of frustration often pushes contact centers into a defensive role. However, what if we could transform high-value conversations with customers into opportunities for business growth and increased trust? It all begins with the digital experience as the initial step of the customer journey in today’s landscape. Failing at this crucial point will undoubtedly create problems both in the contact center and branches. Emphasizing a seamless digital experience is paramount for driving customer satisfaction and loyalty throughout their journey with the bank.

Need to know where to start?

As per our FSI Digital Experience Benchmark report, we can suggest to focus on some key points:

• 26% of digital banking users are frustrated. Improve that. Half of the cause is due to huge loading times (14%) while the additional half is due to bad digital experience (rage clicks, multiple button interactions, etc)
• Focus on mobile experience. Most part of your new visitors are using mobile web and your existing customers primarily use Apps for low touch interactions
• Double down on your existing customers’ experience. Our benchmark shows that Banking is the industry where the My Account pages are the #1 priority. 

Would you like to know more? Check out our demo or ask for more information.

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The post How good digital banking strategy impacts contact centers appeared first on Contentsquare.

The last thing they want from a digital experience is friction. Unfortunately, our 2023 Financial Services Digital Experience Benchmark report shows that over one in four banking sessions last year frustrated users.

In this article, we’ll run through three ways your banking customer journey could be frustrating visitors.

We’ll also explain how our digital experience analytics (DXA) platform helps banks like yours to create frustration-free experiences that retain customers and drive conversions and growth.

Want to find out more about frustration (and consumption, and traffic trends, and much more) in FinServ experiences? You should read our Benchmark report ASAP.

See how your digital experience stacks up.

Download the 2023 Financial Services Digital Experience Benchmark report.

Get my free copy

1: Your customer journey is too slow

Our first obstacle: Slow loading pages, which our Financial Services Benchmark report pinpoints as the leading cause of user frustration in insurance and banking customer journeys last year.

In 2022, slow page loads impacted 13.9% of financial services sessions—and sites with load times over two seconds have 9.2% higher bounce rates than those that load in under one second.

How slow page loads are negatively affecting the insurance and banking customer journey

Our research shows that FinServs are working on reducing site speed. Site load time decreased on financial service websites by -9.1% year-over-year in 2022.

This is excellent news for FinServ customers. But it puts further pressure on banks and insurance providers to ensure they’re meeting heightened expectations.

To ensure your site isn’t falling behind, you’ll need a sophisticated speed analysis tool—which (among many other things) Contentsquare provides.

2: Your customer journey features confusing or malfunctioning pages

Page design can frustrate visitors in all sorts of ways: Users don’t know where to click next, or miss out on crucial (or simply delightful) content because it’s placed too far down the page, or are overwhelmed by too many options or too much information.

Once again, a DXA platform can make all the difference here. Contentsquare customers can leverage technologies such as Zone-based Heatmaps to see where customers are (and aren’t) clicking and scrolling—and redesign their pages to optimize experiences.

For example, using our platform Natwest Group found that its Mortgage Calculator tool’s ‘compare’ functionality was only being used by 6% of customers. This led them to make changes to the page that drove an estimated £500k in additional revenue.

Here’s another example: In an effort to improve conversions by reducing distractions, Leeds Building Society used Zone-based Heatmaps to identify areas of its product pages that customers were spending too much time on. (See screenshot below.)

Exposure times on Leeds Building Society’s website as shown via Zone-Based Heatmaps

Their findings led them to simplify pages (see screenshot below), ultimately increasing average conversion rates by +40%—with some pages increasing conversion rate by +80%.

Simplifications to product pages made by Leeds Building Society as a result of Contentsquare analysis

Client-side technical errors are another big cause of frustration. When buttons don’t work and forms won’t fill, customers get frustrated fast.

Given the size and complexity of most websites, you’ll likely need an AI-driven tool like our own CS Insights to bring technical errors to your attention before they do too much damage. You’ll also need investigative tools like Session Replay to uncover the root cause of user frustration through a user’s-eye perspective.

3: Your customer journey falls short on in-page support

When users hit a snag in your experience, whether it’s a technical issue or a stage in a process they don’t understand, they need to be able to access in-page (or in-app) support ASAP.

The clock is ticking, and if you force customers to root through your website for an FAQ or wait in a queue for your contact center for an issue that could be resolved without a conversation, they’ll feel frustrated—and undervalued—fast.

Making these options available to your site users is up to your digital team, of course. But Contentsquare can help you identify precisely where in your journeys in-page support (whether that’s self-support or live chat) is most needed.

For example, our Customer Journey Analysis tool can help you detect and zero-in on bottlenecks and dead-ends in your banking customer journey where users are routinely getting stuck, or doubling back, or exiting altogether.

Discover where customers need support with Customer Journey Analysis

A frustration-free digital banking customer journey? It’s possible with Contentsquare.

Banks that eliminate frustration from their journeys identified in our benchmark report will lose less business (in the form of bounces) and generate more revenue (in the form of conversions).

Of course, that’s not all they need to do. You can learn what else should be on your to-do list by reading our benchmark report, or get a quick overview in our blog summarizing 5 reasons to read it.

But whether it’s removing frustration, monitoring and stimulating user activity, understanding session consumption or getting insights into your incoming traffic and user segments, Contentsquare has you covered.

Watch the six-minute demo below to see how you can start fixing frustration and dialing up the delight in your banking or insurance customer experience with Contentsquare this year.

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The post 3 ways your banking customer journey is frustrating customers—and what to do about it appeared first on Contentsquare.

What sets apart the leaders in digital banking? How do they manage to stand out and consistently attract new customers? And perhaps most importantly, how do they navigate the complex web of varying needs and desires of millions of individuals? 

Uncovering the secrets behind their success is a fascinating journey that requires a deep dive into their customer-centric strategies, innovative technologies, and ability to adapt to evolving trends. In this article, we unravel the digital banking strategy and strategies but also tactics employed by digital banking leaders, shedding light on the path to digital banking excellence.

They allow their customers to do 100% digital what they want (and never fail them)

In their digital banking strategy, leaders prioritize meeting their customers’ expectations by offering seamless and reliable digital services. They understand that customers increasingly prefer digital channels for everyday transactions and, only if necessary, ask for a professional to help them for the most important ones. 

In fact, banks themselves are inclined towards digital services because of an additional reason: the significant cost advantage it provides. The cost per transaction in digital banking can be as low as 0.1 USD, compared to the lower-end cost of 6 USD for servicing through contact centers.

So it happens that the preferred method for interacting with a bank for most common transactions is the most cost-effective as well. 

Keeping these factors in mind, digital banking leaders focus on enhancing self-service capabilities for low-touch transactions. They ensure that these services are delivered at scale and consistently, recognizing that nothing is more frustrating for a customer than encountering a flawed or subpar experience. Studies indicate that when customers are compelled to shift from digital to human service, their Net Promoter Score (NPS) drops by a staggering 36 points.

To avoid disappointing customers, it is crucial to offer the experience they desire and never fall short. Building trust and meeting customer expectations should be a top priority in the digital banking landscape.

They understand that mobile banking is the best complement to physical branches

According to The Digital Banking Report, a whopping 64% of bankers strongly believe that mobile banking is the best alternative to traditional bank branches. In today’s digital era, it’s no surprise that mobile devices have become the primary way we access the online world. In the United States alone, a staggering 220 million users regularly use mobile banking, and 4 out of 10 people cite it as a major reason for switching banks.

In their Digital banking strategy,  leaders understand these changing customer preferences and work hard to give customers the freedom to do what they need through digital channels. They recognize that in our fast-paced world, banking should fit seamlessly into our busy lives. Mobile banking takes the lead by offering unmatched convenience, allowing customers to handle their finances whenever and wherever they want.

Imagine being able to check your account balance while enjoying your morning coffee at a local café. Think about how convenient it would be to transfer money to a friend during your lunch break, without the need to visit a physical bank branch. Mobile banking liberates customers from the limitations of traditional banking hours and locations. It empowers individuals to be in control of their finances on their own terms, without being tied down to physical branches.

By prioritizing excellence in app experience and innovation, banks aim to secure a competitive edge in the dynamic world of digital banking and make sure that they offer the experience their customers are demanding, and retain them. 

See how your digital experience stacks up.

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Their recipe for success is fast iteration and solid decisions at scale

Digital banking leaders have a deep understanding of their customers and their preferences. They go beyond simply listening to what customers say, recognizing that a significant portion of customer experience lies in their actions and behavior between clicks. By closely observing and analyzing user behavior, these leaders gain valuable insights into what truly matters to customers.

These leaders grasp the importance of making an impact at scale. Every decision they make is guided by the goal of maximizing benefits for the majority of their customer base. They meticulously measure the effects of introducing new features or resolving issues to ensure they consistently build a narrative of success. Understanding how each change impacts users allows them to refine their offerings and deliver the most value. And they do it fast and consistently. 

Maintaining a long-term mindset is crucial in the ever-evolving digital landscape. Digital experiences are an ongoing process, as customers evolve, learn, and adapt their behaviors. These leaders embrace the philosophy of continuous improvement, constantly learning and iterating at a rapid pace. Armed with behavioral data, they have the confidence to understand their customers deeply and quantitatively measure the value they deliver.

By listening attentively to customers, focusing on impact at scale, and embracing an iterative approach, digital banking leaders navigate the complexities of customer expectations and maintain a competitive edge in the dynamic realm of digital banking. Their commitment to understanding and delivering what customers truly want ensures their sustained success in the ever-changing digital landscape.

What to do now?

Contentsquare can help you put your customer experience at the center of your decision making at scale. You can quickly understand what’s frustrating your customers and find the context and detail you need for faster resolution and digital banking iteration. 

As per our FSI Digital Experience Benchmark report, we can suggest to focus on some key points:

• 26% of digital banking users are frustrated. Improve that. Half of the cause is due to huge loading times (14%) while the additional half is due to bad digital experience (rage clicks, multiple button interactions, etc)
• Focus on mobile experience. Most part of your new visitors are using mobile web and your existing customers primarily use Apps for low touch interactions
• Double down on your existing customers’ experience. Our benchmark shows that Banking is the industry where the My Account pages are the #1 priority. 

Would you like to know more? Check out our demo or ask for more information. 

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Historically a high-churn industry, Insurance is now more focused on nurturing customer loyalty and securing customer retention.

As a result, carriers are all vying to provide the slickest, most satisfying and ‘Amazon-like’ digital customer experience possible.

So how well are they doing? Read the 2023 Financial Services Digital Experience Benchmark report to find out.

See how your digital experience stacks up.

Download the 2023 Financial Services Digital Experience Benchmark report.

Get my free copy

The report sets out the current benchmark for CX excellence in Insurance and the Financial Services industry in general. (If you’d like to know more before you read, check out our article that lays out 5 reasons to read the report.)

In this article, we’ll run through five strategies for improving the insurance customer experience suggested by findings in our report, and explain how to use digital experience analytics (DXA) to execute them.

1. Optimize your insurance customer experience for all channels and devices

The 2023 Financial Services Digital Experience report shows that traffic to financial services sites is overwhelmingly organic (89.1%) and desktop-based (61.1%).

But mobile traffic is increasingly important: Paid mobile web traffic jumped +11.3% and 55.2% of new visitors to financial services sites were on mobile. And in Insurance, the percentage of desktop visitors who were new dropped from 38.6% in 2021 to 31.9% in 2022.

What to do and how DXA helps

The complexity of traffic to insurance sites means that, while you certainly should be optimizing your web experience for mobile (particularly for new visitors) you really have to optimize for every traffic source and channel.

Monitoring experiences via a digital experience analytics platform that enables segmented analysis will help you understand how different user groups behave on your site.

Contentsquare’s Customer Journey Mapping tool will let you see at a glance how the paths typically taken by new visitors differ from returning visitors, how mobile users and desktop users differ, how new mobile users differ from returning mobile users… And so on.

And you can dig in deeper, too, analyzing experiences page-by-page, applying Zone-based Heatmaps to see where different visitor groups are clicking and scrolling on your site.

2. Encourage user activity to cut bounces and improve engagement on insurance customer experience

One of the most powerful metrics uncovered in our Benchmark report is user activity—the proportion of time per session users are clicking, scrolling, swiping and typing.

Compared to financial services sites with the lowest level of activity, financial services sites with the highest level of activity per session see:

• -58% lower bounce rates
• +41% deeper sessions (i.e. more pages viewed per session)

The most active page types on insurance sites are Category and search pages. This makes sense, given that customer acquisition remains the biggest focus of insurance sites. (With search being used to zero-in on products.)

What to do and how DXA helps

With insurance carriers pivoting to a retention model, monitoring activity levels on ‘my account’ pages could be pivotal to gauging the success of customer retention strategies.

In any case, carriers should use DXA to closely monitor activity levels throughout their customer journeys. Pages with high levels of activity are ripe for testing and content optimization; pages with low activity levels could require more interactive options to encourage more engagement from visitors.

3. Pinpoint and eliminate friction from your insurance customer experience

User frustration was a feature just over a third of insurance site sessions in 2022. That’s even worse than in Banking, where ‘only’ a little over a quarter of sessions frustrated site users in some way.

While both sectors were equally impacted by slow page loads, the most prominent frustration factor highlighted in our Benchmark report, insurance site visitors exhibited several symptoms of frustration more frequently than banking site visitors, including multiple field interactions (7%) and rage clicks (5.6%).

These symptoms tend to be caused by long, complex forms and rigid digital journeys—both lamentably commonplace features in insurance site experiences.

What to do and how DXA helps

Insurance carriers need to up their game when it comes to detecting and rooting out frustration in their digital customer experiences.

As well as using a speed analysis tool to combat the most common and damaging form of frustration, carriers can use AI-enhanced error analysis tools like CS Find & Fix to detect symptoms of poorly designed, rigid or broken experiences in their customer journeys as soon as they happen.

An important, Insurance-specific priority should be removing frustration from online forms. Contentsquare’s Form Analysis product can show you which fields are causing errors, struggles or confusion—without having to deploy custom tags for capturing interactions.

4. Track session consumption metrics to understand where to make changes

Visitors to insurance websites consume more content than visitors to banking sites—and, in fact, more than visitors to most sectors.

They spend more time per page than visitors to banking sites—on every major page type other than the homepage. (Spending the most time on product and category pages.)

Insurance sites also have a notably high scroll rate: 63.3%. That’s significantly higher than the scroll rate on banking sites (52.5%) and the average scroll rate across the 9 industries featured in our Global Benchmark report (50%).

It makes sense that insurance site visitors consume more content. Insurance products are complicated, and insurance sites tend to contain a density of detail, often below the fold.

What to do and how DXA helps

While the scroll rate for insurance sites is far above the average, at 63.3% it still averages only about two-thirds. Therefore, critical content and calls to action should be placed as high up pages as possible.

It should also be noted that users spending longer on pages is a potentially ambiguous signal. It could indicate absorption and engagement in content—or confusion, hesitation, or boredom.

Traditional analytics tools can’t give you the full context you need to understand the nuances of customer behavior; digital experience analytics does.

To take just one example, our DXA platform’s Session Replay capability enables businesses to record and play back user sessions. Looking at things from a customer’s perspective helps you understand their behavior, and how your content is influencing it.

5. Insurance customer experience: watch out for—and zero-in on—high bounce rates

While bounce rates rose in FinServ overall, particularly on mobile devices, which saw bounce rates rise 4%, from 54.7% to 58.7% year-on-year, this rise was largely attributable to Banking.

In Insurance, bounce rates rose by 2% on desktop (to 42%, much lower than Banking’s 53.2%), but they actually decreased slightly on mobile (from 53.5% to 53.2%).

What to do and how DXA helps

Bounce rates might not have gone up much in Insurance last year, but they’re still high—and insurance carriers can’t rest on their laurels. They should be looking to reduce bounce rates wherever possible.

That means increasing engagement and user activity and reducing user frustration at every stage of the customer journey. That’s why you need digital experience analytics.

Only DXA will give you the macro and micro view of that journey to understand what’s frustrating and engaging site visitors and (through Impact Quantification) how their frustration and engagement is impacting your bottom line.

Improve the insurance customer experience with Contentsquare

Generally speaking, the insurance customer experience currently being provided by most carriers needs to be optimized from end-to-end to secure customer loyalty and drive growth in this era of intense competition and economic uncertainty.

Contentsquare’s digital experience analytics platform can make that optimization happen, fast.

Watch this 6 minute product demo to see for yourself how Contentsquare helps businesses in all sectors build better, more human (and more profitable) experiences.

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Of course, customer retention has always been valuable. Returning customers cost less to serve, have a higher lifetime value and are more likely to refer new customers your way.

In fact, according to a study by Bain and Company, FinServs who increase customer retention by a mere 5% can see a 25% increase in profit.¹

But in the current financial services market—highly competitive and technologically and economically disrupted—customer retention isn’t just great for business: It’s essential.

In our last article focusing on how financial services firms can optimize their digital customer experiences for growth, we gave readers a broad overview of findings from our Financial Services Digital Experiences Benchmark report.

In this article, we’ll share three customer retention strategies for banks and insurers to ensure you can continue to grow your customer base and business in today’s unstable, ultra-competitive market.

Make your customers feel valued with these customer retention strategies

A recent Forrester survey reports that among direct banking customers who felt valued, 87% planned to stay with the brand.

Similar percentages planned to purchase more from the brand and advocate for the brand—and the numbers were even better for multichannel banking customers.

Bottom line: A valued customer is a loyal customer, and in this digital-driven era one of the most powerful ways to make them feel valued is to ensure you’re offering them an outstanding digital customer experience.

Now let’s talk about customer retention strategies that will help you do exactly that…

1. Get to know your customers through research and analytics

Customer retention hinges on emotion. Forrester writes: “Emotion—how customers feel about their experience—has a bigger effect on customer loyalty than the ease or effectiveness of the experience.”

In order for financial services firms to provide their customers with the best possible digital experiences, they first need to know how their customers feel about the experiences they’re already being offered—and what sort of experiences visitors to financial services sites feel really good about.

But it can be tough to get in touch. While FinServs often get to directly communicate with customers and find out how they’re feeling, whenever customers fail to leave feedback or get in touch with your contact center, their emotions will remain a mystery to you.

And what you don’t know can hurt you. So how can FinServs understand the emotions of their customers better?

Item one on their agenda should be to download the 2023 Financial Services Digital Experiences Benchmark report—which offers a comprehensive, metric-by-metric overview of how financial services site visitors felt about their experiences last year.

See how your digital experience stacks up.

Download the 2023 Financial Services Digital Experience Benchmark report.

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That will get you off to a great start. But when it comes to accessing your site visitors’ emotions on a day-to-day basis, you’re going to have to invest in a digital experience analytics (DXA) platform.

Traditional analytics platforms show you how many clicks, bounces and conversions you’re getting. But these metrics (while vital), don’t show you how visitors are behaving between clicks, much less how they might be feeling at any given stage of your digital journeys.

A DXA platform like Contentsquare Digital Analytics Cloud can give you the metrical insights and investigative tools you need to understand not only how visitors are behaving when navigating through your site, but also why they’re behaving as they are.

2. Cater to every customer with personalized, flexible experiences

A surefire way to make a customer feel valued is to treat them like an individual instead of a generic visitor. That’s why personalization is a vital.

Getting personalization right depends on data. You need to know as much about site visitors as possible so you can tailor your experience as closely as possible to their needs—including where they’ve come from to get to your site, what device they’re using to access your site, and whether they’ve been there before.

For a general picture of the traffic sources your customers are most likely to be coming from, the devices they’re most likely to be using and what percentage are most likely to be new or returning, you can refer to our Financial Services Benchmark report.

However, every company is unique, with its own unique audience, and you need to know the ins and outs of your specific audience in order to serve them a suitable experience. Knowing their actions, intent and needs is crucial, and requires a DXA platform to provide context to metrics.

Catering to each individual who visits your site is also about flexibility.

Spoiler alert: our Benchmark report reveals an extremely varied and complex mix of devices and traffic sources in traffic to financial services sites.

Desktop traffic dominates overall—but mobile traffic is driving most new visits. Unpaid sources drive most new visits—but paid traffic is driving a significant percentage of new visits.

In a word: It’s complicated. And these stats are really only scratching the surface.

You have to enable digital customers to interact with you in whatever way is most convenient to them at that time (including in-person branch visits), without ever ‘breaking’ the experience by obliging them to reiterate who they are and what they want with every change of channel.

FinServs should seek to curate cross-channel journeys that let customers finish online what they started in-branch, and vice versa. And for maximum flexibility, they should also aim to add more channels—such as WhatsApp—into the digital mix.

3. Save your customers’ time with fast, efficient, supportive experiences

If there’s one thing banks need to value about their customers, it’s their time.

The biggest selling point of digital banking and insurance for customers is convenience. By handling their financial services transactions digitally, they avoid having to take the time out of their day to visit a branch.

But if your digital FinServ experience is excessively time-consuming, that convenience is compromised or even nullified and customers could start Googling around for a more efficient alternative.

Unfortunately, the financial services site experiences analyzed in putting together our Financial Services Benchmark report show clear signs of testing users’ patience.

More than 1 in 4 (27.8%) of sessions were marred by some form of user frustration—and the most common form of frustration was one explicitly tied to wasting customer’s time: Slow page loads.

Slow page loads impacted 13.9% of sessions—and impacted them seriously, with sites that had load times of over two seconds seeing 9.2% higher bounce rates than those that load in under one second.

For insurers and banks, customer retention is often nurtured by giving their customers something extra in their digital customer experience. But it’s equally important to take frustration away from them.

By removing obstacles from their journeys—whether that’s a slow loading page, a technical error or a flaw in page design—and by offering them in-page, easily accessible support when they get stuck, you’re making things easier, quicker and less stressful for them.

The real challenge for businesses is to locate the precise points in their customer journeys where frustration is flaring up.

Once again, a DXA platform will be invaluable here. Here’s just a few of the ways Contentsquare helps businesses route out frustration from their journeys:

• CS Insights leverages AI to bring the symptoms of frustration (such as ‘rage clicks’) and technical errors to their immediate attention
• Customer Journey Analysis enables you to identify bottlenecks and dead-ends in your journeys where users are looping and dropping off
• Session Replay lets you investigate the root cause of frustration by replaying aborted or circuitous sessions from a user’s-eye view

Enable more effective customer retention with Contentsquare

Ultimately, all three of the customer retention strategies for banks and insurers that we’ve laid out in this article are about optimizing your digital customer experience—a goal our DXA platform is specifically designed to achieve.

To understand how Contentsquare can help your financial services firm build experiences that attract and retain customers, why not check out this demo?

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1. Bain & Company: Prescription for cutting costs US Banking CX In 2022: Who Does It Well And Why It Matters 

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A great financial services customer experience (CX) can make a big difference to a firm’s bottom line. According to a recent Forrester report, a mere 1-point improvement on the Forrester CX Index score can lead to an incremental $123 million in revenue for a large multichannel bank—and $92 million in revenue for a direct bank.¹

And great customer experiences are far from uniform. The same Forrester report found that more than one-third of direct and multichannel bank customers believed their bank’s CX to be either poor or very poor.

But how do you know if the CX your firm is serving its customers is one of the great ones, one of the poor ones, or something in between? And what does a great financial services customer experience even look like?

That’s precisely what you’ll find out by reading the 2023 Financial Services Digital Experience Benchmark report.

It gives an overview of customer behavior on banking and insurance sites in 2022, including all the most important digital KPIs for driving customer happiness and growth in 2023.

See how your digital experience stacks up.

Download the 2023 Financial Services Digital Experience Benchmark report.

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To create this report, we’ve applied our analysis to a massive dataset, compromising of:

• 9.4 billion page views
• 2.7 billion sessions
• 135 sites
• 26 countries

We’ve translated our findings into easily comprehensible graphs and charts, ready-made for use in reports to your team and executives.

And we’ve included a wealth of strategic insights to help you take on the competition going forward, whether they’re major firms or ‘neo’ newbies. (Thank us later.)

What more do you need to know? If the answer is ‘a little more, please’, we’ve got you covered: Without further ado, here’s five great reasons to download, read and share our report as soon as humanly possible.

1. Get to know your audience via 2022’s web traffic trends

This year, digital leaders in FinServ are tasked with investing in tech to improve CX and drive revenue—but also with tightening up spending in the face of a probable recession.

Knowing your audience will help you invest in things visitors (and customers) actually want, and avoid wasting time and money on things they don’t. It’ll also help you to deliver something your customers increasingly expect: Personalization.

Our report will help you understand who’s visiting your website (and your competitors’ sites), how they’re getting there and what devices they’re using.

It includes all 2022’s key traffic trends, including:

• Percentage of traffic share by source (including paid vs. unpaid)
• Percentage of new vs. returning visitors
• Percentage of traffic driven by desktop vs. mobile

To pick out just one example of a traffic-based insight from our report, we reveal that while desktop dominated traffic (61.1% of it) in 2022, mobile web drove 55.2% of new visits.

But why was this the case? And what does this mean for your digital team’s efforts in 2023?

Well, you’ll have to read the 2023 Financial Services Digital Experience Benchmark report to find out more.

2. Understand why bounces are increasing and where they’re happening

In case you weren’t aware, a bounce is a one-and-done visit: A visitor arrives on your site and ‘bounces’ right back off it again without viewing another page.

Bounce rates rose across Financial Services last year. Most notably, they rose 4 percentage points on mobile (from 54.7% to 58.7%)—and 5 percentage points overall on banking sites (from 55% to 60%).

This certainly sounds like bad news—but is it?

Well, not necessarily. As we explain in our report, the meaning of a bounce varies depending on what sort of page it’s happening on. It certainly can signal disaster, but it can also be reflective of the sort of traffic you’d expect to arrive on a page, and/or what you expect users will try to do.

In order to give you the most nuanced picture possible of bounce rates in FinServ, we’ve sliced-and-diced them in multiple ways, showing you:

• Bounce rates, year-over-year, by device and sector
• Mobile bounce rates, by sector
• Bounce rate by page type, by device
• Bounce rate by page type
• Bounce rate by page, by sub industry

However, with all that about nuance said, while a rising bounce rate might not be disastrous, it’s never ideal.

So you’re probably wondering: What can financial services firms like mine do to bring bounces down—and engagement up? That’s exactly what the next three reasons to read our report are all about.

3. Meet the frustration factors marring your financial services customer experience

A hefty chunk of bounces are caused by friction in the customer journey. By ‘friction’, we mean anything that stops website users from advancing smoothly along the path you want them to proceed along—whether that’s a path to conversion, retention or anything else.

Whether friction is caused by a malfunctioning button, a confusing site design or unclear copy, it breeds frustration. Frustration is not something you want your users to feel; it can easily cause them to exit your experience—often after viewing just one page.

As things stand, frustration is way too common an emotion felt by visitors to financial services websites. Our report reveals that frustration impacts more than 1 in 4 (27.8%) of all FinServ website sessions (fortunately, that’s lower than most other industries, which see more than 1 in 3 visits causing frustration).

The causes of frustration are numerous. The 2023 Financial Services Digital Experience Benchmark report lists the five most common and impactful frustration factors affecting both banking and insurance websites.

You should read the report to get to know, loathe and address them all.

But let’s start with public enemy number one…

4. Learn why site speed is higher stakes than ever for financial services customer experiences

Frustration caused by slow page loads affected 13.9% of financial services sessions in 2022. All these slow page loads undoubtedly helped fuel bounces, as another finding in our report suggests…

Financial services sites with load times over 2 seconds had a 56.5% bounce rate. Financial services sites with the fastest load times (of less than 1 second) had a 51.4% bounce rate.

The good news is that firms seem to be well aware of the importance of site speed, given that site load time decreased by -9.1% year-over-year across all devices.

On the other hand, some of the most heavily trafficked page types for both banking and insurance firms have some of the highest average load times.

The data in our report should help bolster your case—if it needs bolstering—for ratcheting up your site performance as much as possible. Clearly, financial services sites are faster than ever, and users’ expectations for load times are set to get ever more unforgiving.

5. Discover the bounce-thwarting power of user activity

A fast-loading page might stop many users from bouncing off your site, but the effort to stop them from exiting doesn’t stop there.

Removing the friction points we discussed above will help discourage users from leaving, but you also need to engage them as much as possible.

By ‘engage’, we don’t just mean the mental engagement involved in sparking their interest in your products and services and nurturing their desire to act on this—we also mean encouraging them to physically interact with your site.

Our report shows that encouraging users to click, scroll, swipe and type while navigating through your website makes them stick around—and delve deeper.

Compared to sites with the lowest levels of activity, sites with high user activity see -58% lower bounce rates and +41% deeper sessions (with session depth measured by how many pages a user views per session).

To learn more about activity—including which page types see the most activity for both Banking and Insurance, you should know by now what you need to read…

See how your digital experience stacks up.

Download the 2023 Financial Services Digital Experience Benchmark report.

Get my free copy

Optimize your financial services customer experience for ROI with Contentsquare

Armed with the insights that our 2023 Financial Services Digital Experience Benchmark report is frankly overflowing with, you’ll be able to make many improvements to your financial services customer experience. But how will you measure those improvements—and prove them?

It might not be easy. According to Forrester, 54% of CX pros are unable to prove the ROI of their projects. In this time of acute economic uncertainty, that inability to prove impact could spell doom for your CX programs.

To successfully improve your digital customer experience—and prove you’ve done it—you’ll need to measure all the metrics we talk about above, plus the metrics we didn’t have room for.

You can do that with Contentsquare’s Digital Analytics Cloud, our platform that tracks and gives insights into customer behavior at every stage of your customer journeys.

By using Contentsquare to monitor and optimize your journeys, you can generate serious ROI.

Just ask Forrester. They recently published a report on the Total Economic Impact of Contentsquare over three years.

The report found that a composite organization—based on extensive interviews with five of our customers—achieved an amazing 602% ROI from Contentsquare and payback in six months.

Yes: 602%. Download Forrester’s TEI report on Contentsquare to see for yourself just how great for your CX, ROI and salary bump Contentsquare can be.

Discover the Total Economic Impact of Contentsquare 

Download Forrester’s complimentary study to learn how Contentsquare delivered a 602% ROI.

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1. Forrester: US Banking CX In 2022: Who Does It Well And Why It Matters 

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