| By Jim Bruene on August 27, 2010 2:09 PM | Comments (11) |
How did USAA become the most innovative bank in America? I guess its big-bank competitors have been kind of preoccupied with other matters the past few years. And because USAA serves most of its 5 million banking customers remotely, it stands to profit from pushing the envelope in online/mobile delivery.
The latest proof that the bank is both innovative and adored? Posting user reviews right in the middle of the homepage, an inventive and unique approach. And with an average score of 4.7 out of 5 for both checking and auto insurance, the reviews serve as a transparent and effective mass endorsement.
Here's the breakdown of scores received on 6,350 total reviews for USAA's free checking account (as of 12 Aug 2010):
5 stars (excellent) >>> 5,550 (87% of total)
4 stars (good) >>>>>> 329 (5%)
3 stars (average) >>>> 154 (2%)
2 stars (fair) >>>>>>> 110 (2%)
1 star (poor) >>>>>>> 214 (3%)
Relevance for Netbankers: Frankly, I never thought I'd see user reviews posted anywhere on a bank site, let alone the homepage (note 1). If your customers love you, I mean really love you, customer reviews posted directly to an in-house site is a great way to prove it (note 2).
USAA homepage (12 August 2010)
Note: Ad on top for its new Auto Circle car-buying service, complete with its own iPhone app.
Notes:
1. Bank of America also posted user reviews on its site, but the feature appears to have been discontinued a while ago. The last reference I could find on Google about the reviews was in Jan. 2008.
2. This would not be an easy project and would require a significant investment in ongoing monitoring and maintenance. More importantly, it requires a thick skin; your organization would have to be comfortable with a certain amount of complaints being posted. As good as USAA's overall score is, there are still 314 poor reviews posted, 3% of the total. But allowing customers a salient vent-fest on your website may keep them from doing so in more public venues such as Twitter. It also gives you a chance to respond to and resolve posted problems.
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I love this idea, and would welcome further discussion about the technical aspect of implementing a review system (do you build in-house, or are there existing 3rd party applications to leverage?). We have considered it for some time, but the overall management of content and comments requires a lot of planning.
While user reviews are a great addition, and a bold one, the idea certainly is not (as you point out) new. With its roots in commercial sites like Amazon, these reviews can be a great source of cross-sell through data mining and ad delivery. In financial services (beyond your BofA example) I have seen several credit unions employ this effectively. America First comes to mind (link: https://www.americafirst.com/personal/checking-savings/checking/checking.cfm ).
They have done this for years.
Overall, I think it's a step in the right direction, since many external websites like bankrate have been offering reviews for quite some time. It's nice to see USAA add this feature.
If your bank or credit union doesn't have a great relationship with its clients, then I would tread cautiously into these waters.
Great job as always Jim.
One other thing to note about the site. USAA has added a member to member section for customers to talk to one another in a forum setting. This is just as powerful, as it links top reviewers, top commenters, and keeps the website as an active community of posters about their services.
Now I will have to check out USAA's social media sites and see how they can integrate these two powerful features.
Brad Leimer
Twitter @leimer
If you aren't in the military, and spouse isn't either, you'll get the following response after signing up:
Our auto and property insurance is generally available to U.S. military personnel and their families. Although you're not eligible for our auto and property insurance, we encourage you to take advantage of other products offered by our banking, investment and life insurance companies.
Have you seen America First CU or San Francisco Fire CU? They've beenriding the user reviews train for a while now:
» http://www.sffirecu.org/checking-savings/checking
» https://www.americafirst.com/personal/loan-products/vehicle-loans/auto-loan.cfm
USAA is my favorite bank too. They have been reliable to me and my family for years.
Check out their Facebook page - they now offer a My USAA tab that allows you to access your account information directly from Facebook. I'm interested in the security - due to the privacy and security issues that Facebook has.
While it is good to post user reviews and user comments/discussion forums, USAA is neither the first nor necessarily the best at this. Besides the ones already mentioned, Addison Avenue FCU has had discussion groups for some time now (https://groups.addisonavenue.com/groups). Disclosure: I am an employee for Addison.
Also - the USAA groups are moderated and can take up to 72 hours to post. Not a best in class standard for openness.
There are 3 main options for doing user generated content like this. You can do a home grown, buy a simple star/comments solution off the shelf or implement a SaaS from a 3rd party provider.
The two largest Rating & Review providers in the market are BazaarVoice (USAA uses them) or PowerReviews. BazaarVoice tends to be higher price but more customizable. PowerReviews has larger variety of pricing options including a self-serve model that might work well for a trial run or smaller institution.
Both solutions are relatively light technical integrations and both will work with the FI to set reviews up on the relevant products and help launch marketing programs to gather reviews from existing customers.
For the FI group I would see reviews as an extension of the customer service experience initially but long term they are invaluable for data collection and research for your users.
If anybody has follow-up questions feel free to shoot me a note privately or post in the thread. Compliments to USAA and others for leading the way.
Joshua
(Disclosure I am a former employee of PowerReviews.)
Joshua, thanks for the mention. Bazaarvoice offers a end-to-end service for companies in highly regulated industries to implement ratings & reviews and other social commerce tools to build customer conversations into your business. We take care of strategy, design, implementation, content moderation, analysis and reporting. America First, Bank of America, Nationwide, Blue Shield and many others use our services.
For anyone who wants to know more about this, we are happy to share a Forrester report that is a case study on USAA’s use of ratings & reviews and how they drove 15,000 new accounts for them. Please send a note to Joe.Dauskurdas@bazaarvoice.com asking for the report.
Does USAA get any funding from the federal government that other banks don't because of their affiliation with the military?
Do they get special marketing rights?
This could be a reason they are so competitive if they can market to military at a reduced rate.
Or is there selection bias on members the key - they have a slightly better pool of customers to drawn on for accounts. Can you dig deeper on these questions?
Andrew, USAA doesn't get any funding from the federal government or any special marketing rights due to their military association.
You can read more about their history on the Wikipedia page, but basically they started because military members were a high risk group who weren't able to get auto insurance, so a couple officers pooled their money to self-insure themselves. It grew from there.
The USAA auto insurance group membership is still limited to military members and their families, but their banking and other services are generally open to everyone. You can think of their insurance group as similar to a credit union or other institution that limits membership.
So to answer your question, they don't get any special considerations and aren't able to market to military members under any special deals. But they do limit their membership, which gives them a different customer pool than companies who take on anyone.
As a disclosure, I am a USAA member from my days in the military service, but I am not employed or compensated by USAA.