Aptus Consultants

Banks are like supertankers: big and slow to turn around. Weighted down with legacy systems, integration issues following takeovers and competing commercial imperatives, trying to change direction can be a Herculean task. So when Adrian Homer, head of online delivery for Abbey, arrived in 2007 tasked with totally renovating the bank’s website, he had his work cut out. But he was ready for the long haul.

“When I joined, the site had more than 1,200 pages. There weren’t even any global footers, so if you wanted to change the information at the bottom of the page you had to do it separately for each page,” says Homer. “There hadn’t been a redesign for four years. The navigation didn’t make sense and the design showed its age. So I scrapped it completely, re-templated the whole site and introduced more logical left-hand and horizontal tab navigation. The site has now been reduced to 250 pages.”

Fortunately for him there was board-level recognition that an overhaul was long overdue. “I was pushing at an open door,” says Homer, who has been a judge for the new media age Effectiveness Awards. “To be given a blank piece of paper was very exciting. It was a joy, to be honest.” Backed by the Spanish banking giant Santander, Abbey was spared the worst perils of the credit crunch and could afford to look forward. But that isn’t to say Homer’s Spanish bosses, less experienced in the ways of UK internet banking, didn’t require some gentle educating from time to time. “For example, accessibility and the requirements of the Disability Discrimination Act aren’t as big an issue in Spain and South America as they are here.”

When he arrived from his previous employer, Barclays, where he had been senior online marketing manager in its electronic banking division, Homer was astonished to learn Abbey had never done any search optimisation or usability testing on its site. So he brought in search specialist iCrossing to help achieve better page positions in natural results. The bank had been performing dismally in the listings, often appearing 200th and below on searches for key financial terms. The right tags and metadata were incorporated into freshly minted content provided by outsourced copywriters. It means Abbey now regularly appears in the top 20 results, says Homer.

This work had to be closely integrated with improved usability, so Homer enlisted FoolProof to improve the architecture of the site. “We’re in control of our content again, and syndicated research and usability studies have shown there had been a positive response to the redesign from customers and non-customers alike”, he says. But he acknowledges there’s sometimes a tension between optimising pages for Google and providing clean content. “There’s a dichotomy there,” he says. “We want to be top of natural listings but we also want to provide copy that makes sense to customers. Sometimes those two don’t match. You can’t sacrifice usability for high ratings.”

There’s also tension between paid and natural search, he says. “The aim of natural search is to reduce the cost of paid search, so the former is an enemy of the latter. Natural search is far more trusted than sponsored searches by customers and is better at developing long-term relationships. But paid search remains the fastest way to get our message across. So we have to use both.”

The ultimate aim of any ecommerce site is to make the path to purchase as short and painless as possible. Banking is no exception. Yet the complexity of some financial products often makes this impossible and even undesirable. You don’t want people buying products they don’t understand, for example, otherwise you’ll fall foul of the Financial Services Authority, especially at a time like this when responsible lending is under scrutiny. Homer has been busy decluttering the application process and adding ‘How do I?’ help tools to reduce customer drop-off - users giving up before completion.

One particular irritant for existing customers is the requirement to re-enter their personal details when switching between products. To address this, Abbey introduced a Secure Site Sales application in August that pre-populates application forms for existing customers. “This sounds an obvious thing to do,” says Homer, “but we didn’t have the infrastructure to enable it before. Now we do and it has been a real magic moment for customers. We integrated [Abbey subsidiary] Alliance & Leicester’s application and now have one that’s considered best in class for savings products.”

Earlier this year Abbey decided, in contrast to other financial services brands, to increase already substantial digital spend (nma 22 January 2009). But the truth is Abbey has lagged behind its competitors in online banking for many years, despite being one of the pioneers in the field with its Cahoot online-only bank. This subsidiary is still kept at arm’s length and Homer has no responsibility for it. He puts some of Abbey’s digital dithering down to its building society heritage and its older customer demographic, but insists the majority of new customers are now coming to the bank through its internet channel.

The next major challenge is the corporate rebranding exercise which will transfer all UK subsidiaries to the Santander name by 11 January next year. “At least introducing templates to the site has made this job less onerous,” says Homer, “but it’ll be a big challenge keeping all the good search work we’ve done for the Abbey brand and adding Santander to it. We have the chassis, now we’re getting a new body.”