Catering to Your Customers

We are all customers, we all have personal preferences.

Websites we prefer to visit, stores we shop at, cars we drive and so much more.  All of these decisions reflect back on who we are, and who we present ourselves to be.  The more personalized the approach and pitch, the more likely you’ll react positively to it.  This is just as true for the web as it is for a face to face meeting.

The advantage of the web being you can interact with a significantly larger number of people than you could in person over the same period of time.  And the technology has long existed for you cater how your website presents itself based on who is using it.  While some organizations take advantage of this to some degree, it is rarely used to it’s full potential.  I’d like to share a story with you about an organization that has tested their customer log in site to such a degree, that it looks entirely different depending on who is logging in. A system they refer to as The Chameleon Dashboard.

The organization is a financial consulting firm, and works with tens of thousands of wealthy individuals. These clients range from young musicians to middle age business executives, from retirees to lotto winners (like megamillion winners.) And, if you couldn’t guess, these different clients have very different goals, desires, and preferences.  While their financial advisor may not always be available, they always have access to log into their account management dashboard through the firms website. Here is where it gets interesting.

Through years of testing, and generation after generation of design iterations, they’ve developed custom dashboards for their different users. Users are categorized by a number of categories and behavioral triggers as well as selected preferences. For the examples below, I’ll use age as the primary metric.

• Younger clients see a dashboard that is more similar to Facebook’s interface.
• Middle aged clients, who have shown a penchant for more advanced research see a dashboard that looks like the Wall Street Journal’s stocks page.
• Older clients (generally) who have a preference for reading text encounter a dashboard like Wikipedia.
• Users who prefer to browse graphics interact with a site that has some copy, but provides data in a format similar to a Flickr gallery or Pinterest.

Since the implementation of the chameleon dashboard not only have they increased their client retention statistics, it has dramatically reduced their customer service requests and the time spent on the phone with the financial advisors themselves.  Users log in significantly more often, and spend more time using the dashboard itself. The end result is advisors are able to better leverage their time, and support a larger client base ultimately bringing in a significant amount of additional revenue without increasing overhead or HR expenses.

Does anyone else happen to know of other industries that are leveraging this technology?