CASE STUDY

National City boosts online application completion rates and new account openings with live chat

Headquartered in Cleveland, Ohio, National City Corporation (NYSE : NCC ) is one of the nation's largest financial holding companies. The company operates through an extensive banking network, primarily in Ohio, Florida, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Michigan, Missouri, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, and also serves customers in selected markets nationally. Its core businesses include commercial and retail banking, mortgage financing and servicing, consumer finance and asset management. Recognized as a leader in customer experience, National City scored high marks in the 2006 study, "The Keynote Customer Experience Rankings for Banking Web Sites." The independent competitive intelligence study ranked National City in the top three based on the appeal of its overall site design, organization and ease of opening an account online.

The Challenge

With an award-winning website, more than 1,400 branch offices and 2,100 automatic teller machines (ATMs), National City's retail banking division is driven by a customer-focused culture, supplying convenience, flexibility, quality service, and consistency across all delivery channels. Although branch and ATM utilization enjoy continued growth, the call center and online channels represent significant expansion opportunities for the bank. Aware that increased comfort, confidence and familiarity with the Web were driving consumers online for research, information and advice, National City wanted to use live chat as another avenue to reach out to customers. The bank's Web channel leaders had assumed that visitors would be responsive to live chat, but wanted to validate their theory by conducting a pilot program based on specific and measurable success criteria: new account openings.

LivePerson Solution

Counting seven of the world's largest financial services institutions as customers, LivePerson offered the proven technology, domain expertise, implementation track record, and ongoing program optimization that National City was seeking in a strategic provider.

Leveraging LivePerson Enterprise, National City deployed proactive chat on limited areas of its website. The overall objective was to create a new avenue to reach out to customers and:

Promote customer advocacy by differentiating the online experience. One of the strongest drivers of future purchase intent for financial products among consumers, customer advocacy is the consumers' perception that a bank does what's best for them, not just what's best for its own bottom line. As visitors research financial products online, National City Product Specialists proactively offer to help explain rates, fees and other product features. LivePerson's configurable business rules engine analyzes traffic patterns in real time to identify and target site visitors most likely to benefit from chat interactions.

The permission-based application gives consumers the option of accepting or declining the invitations; almost 20 percent of invited visitors on National City's site accept the proactive chat invitations.

Drive online channel usage and increase application completion rates. According to Forrester Research, consumers prefer the online channel over branches and ATMs because it's the most convenient delivery method; however, they typically switch channels to apply for products because they need human assistance to make decisions.

National City allows website visitors to stay in their channel of choice. LivePerson's proprietary technology replicates the in-branch experience, enabling bank representatives to provide real-time answers and live advice to online visitors.

Measure ROI and optimize results. The platform's comprehensive reports reveal trends, agent performance, rules effectiveness, conversion rates, and incremental revenue to track and benchmark key performance indicators across financial services industry standards.

LivePerson's professional services team works handin- hand with National City's Web strategists to analyze performance, identify improvement areas and optimize results.

Results

Measured by specific success criteria developed before launching the program, National City's chat pilot was considered an overwhelming success.

In addition to implementing a full-scale deployment of the LivePerson Enterprise platform, the bank is expanding the application to other lines of business and continues to achieve:

Unprecedented customer satisfaction levels. Online visitors applauded their chat experiences; National City received 95 percent customer satisfaction ratings, and exit surveys revealed comments like these:

"This was my first experience with live chat on the Internet. It was great! Honestly, I think it was much faster than calling the local National City by us. And the specialist was wonderful!"

"I think live chat is wonderful. Two thumbs up, it was very fast and to the point. Quickly got the results I needed. Thank you."

Six times conversion rate growth. The conversion rate for visitors who chat is six times greater than self service. The online channel currently represents the fastest growing sales and information channel for National City.