Quite some years ago, we were involved in an ambitious project at a large Canadian bank called ‘Branch of the Future’; the title was grandiose but the objective was simple. At the time, customers sat on one side of a desk opposite the customer service representative and between them sat the ubiquitous 3270 ‘green screen’ terminal.

The customer typically looked at the label on the back of the terminal while the rep punched away, seemingly forever, on the keyboard. Our job was to get the customer and rep sitting side by side, facing the screen, reviewing the options together while engaged in a dialogue. Dialogue had been shown to be very effective in helping customer understanding and decision-making.

The project scope ended up being huge, hinging on two impracticable factors. First and foremost it required conversion to a ‘user-friendly’ GUI, just so the customer could understand the data. Second, it demanded a change in the rep to customer relationship.

Now 20 years later, we are still enjoying the same conversations. Now we have web-based ‘GUIs’ in front of the customer but the seat next to them is empty. Financial service companies are struggling with integration between the web and the customer service rep, or the field agent. Plenty of studies have shown that while many customers are comfortable and often prefer to research online, they favor person-to-person contact to complete business.

The website is an integral aspect of the company marketing and positioning but whether it is integral to a multi-channel end-to-end business process is still in question. Strategies in the industry vary significantly; New York Life has a clear and unambiguous goal of maximizing high quality telephone conversations between customer and agent. Prudential and State Farm are starting to encourage deeper online research with the provision of product price quoting tools while still providing obvious links to the agent ‘locator’. GEICO and Progressive are probably closest to the original concept of the ‘Branch of the Future’. Both now provide strong self-service tools in conjunction with plenty of obvious dialogue options. Using chat and telephone, the call center agent ‘guides’ the customer to completion, on or off line. It has taken 20 years, and the rep is now hundreds of miles away, but the customer and rep are finally looking at the same screen.

We have reviewed hundreds of industry websites and continue to find a lack of consistency. We can only conclude that many sites are not optimal for the customer buying experience, and consequently detrimental to the company. This inconsistency goes beyond web to agent integration and is more than be reasonably explained by concerns such as compliance.