NETTING IT OUT

In this report, the next in a series of customer self-service test drives, I describe my experience in helping myself to customer service at Sovereignbank.com by performing key activities of self-service Customer Scenarios® and evaluating that experience against our framework for customer self-service.

Overall, Sovereignbank.com does not make it easy for you to help yourself to perform customer service activities. The site exceeds requirements only for the implementation of its UI. It needs improvement for supporting activities in all but the explore lifecycle phase and for its implementation of content, search, escalation to assisted service, and mobile device support.

CUSTOMER SELF-SERVICE

Customer Self-Service Case Studies

This report is the next in a series of customer self-service test drives. The series follows and complements our previous customer self-service research: our customer self-service framework[1], matrix[2], and product reviews[3]. In this series, I analyze and evaluate real-world implementations of customer self-service experience by helping myself to companies’ self-service facilities. These really are self-service test drives. I don’t involve companies’ personnel. In this report, I test drive Sovereignbank.com.

Three-Step Test-Drive Approach

My test drive of Sovereignbank.com had three steps. First, I took an inventory of the customer service capabilities accessible on Sovereignbank.com. Second, I tried to perform the key activities of self-service Customer Scenarios on the site. These are activities that customers have told us they commonly help themselves to perform. They’re activities that cross the phases of the customer lifecycle. Third, I examined the site’s self-service implementation, adapting and using our framework for evaluating customer self-service products and services.

BACKGOUND

Company

Sovereign Bancorp, Inc. (NYSE: SOV) is the parent company of Sovereign Bank. Headquartered in Philadelphia, PA, the firm is the 17th largest financial institution in the United States with $89 billion in assets, 785 branches, 2,000 ATMs, and 12,000 employees.

Sovereign Bank was created in 1984 under the name Penn Savings Bank, F.S.B. through the merger of two financial institutions that primarily served customers in Berks and Lancaster counties, PA. The firm was incorporated in 1987 and assumed its current name in December 1991. Since its creation, Sovereign has grown significantly through the acquisition of 27 financial institutions.

Today, Sovereign Bank serves customers in the Northeast United States, primarily in Pennsylvania, Connecticut, New York, and Massachusetts, with an array of financial services and products including retail banking, business and corporate banking, cash management, capital markets, wealth management, and insurance.

My Background with Sovereign Bank

I have been a Sovereign Bank customer for four years. I have a checking account at the bank and I use the bank’s online banking services. I came to Sovereign after a fee increase at a previous bank. I chose Sovereign for its low fees and for its affiliation with my chapter of AAA. Through that affiliation, I got attractive terms on a credit card and low or no banking fees. Note that the attractive AAA credit card terms are now gone and one of the activities that I’ll perform in my test drive is to explore, select, and apply for a new credit card.

ACTIVITES OF THE CUSTOMER LIFECYCLE IN FINANCIAL SERVICES

Customer lifecycles pretty much have the same phases independent of the supplier’s industry. Before we customers interact with a company, we do some planning to figure out what kind of offering we need. Then we begin interacting, typically following this sequence of lifecycle phases:

• Explore a company’s offerings to determine whether the offerings can fulfill our plans’ objectives
• Select, buy (renew or replenish), and install/implement the offering that best meets our objectives
• Use the offering
• Maintain the offering and our relationship with the organization from which we’ve bought it.

This test drive is my first test drive of a financial service company’s Web site. My prior test drives had been of the Web sites of product companies like Apple or telecommunications services companies like Comcast. When I began this test drive of Sovereignbank.com, I realized that I had to adapt the customer lifecycle activities to those that I would perform in a financial services context. For example, financial services offerings don’t break or fail like physical products or telecommunications services. Activities of the use lifecycle phase, especially problem diagnosis and resolution activities, which are of critical importance in the context of products, are irrelevant to financial services. In addition, you don’t buy and order financial services offerings. You select and apply for them and you’re interested in the status of your application in the same way that you’re interested in order status for physical products.

As a result, for this test drive of Sovereignbank.com and for our future test drives of other financial services sites, the customer lifecycle activities that I’ll try to help myself to perform are listed in Table A.

Customer Self-Service Activities on Sovereignbank.com/Support
(Please download the PDF to see the table.)
Table A. This table lists and describes the sections of the Sovereignbank.com support landing page. Its rows are keyed to the numbers inserted into Illustration 2, which shows the support landing page.

CUSTOMER SELF-SERVICE CAPABILITIES INVENTORY AT SOVEREIGNBANK.COM

The first step of our test drive of Sovereignbank.com is taking an inventory of the customer self-service capabilities accessible there. Go to Sovereignbank.com and you’ll see that the site’s home page, shown in Illustration 1, displays a link to “Customer Service” at the bottom.

Sovereignbank.com Home Page
(Please download the PDF to see the illustration.)
Illustration 1. This illustration shows the home page of Sovereignbank.com.

I circled the link in green. It’s not too easy to find...