Top 4 reasons online product applications are abandoned

Most financial services technology teams just seem to have it in for the consumer! We just don't seem to want those customers to make their product purchases online!

After spending a motza on the web site, making it beautiful and full of wonderful compelling content, we generally think that is enough for the customer, so we just stick an 'apply now' button on the page and figure that should be enough.

But what if the customer still has questions? (Ah, that is for another discussion...)

But let's for now consider that the content on the page, say about life insurance or a mortgage, was so compelling and so complete (yep...we are talking pretty low statistics here) that the consumer decides "yes! I am going to buy now, I am going to fill this application in online"....ok, we have got a live one!

What's the most common process today for a typical financial eApp.

Firstly, for most financial applications, there is generally a lot of information that needs to be collected so the eApplication wizard may be 5-10 pages long asking all sorts of personal and financial questions, what is the common consumer experience?

1. No ability to save an incomplete app (I don't have all the information now)
2. Too many mandatory fields -(is title really mandatory?)
3. System won't allow submission of an incomplete app (this is as much as I can tell you now)
4. One way process - (can't the service centre help me?)

Bottom line? We want to encourage our end consumers to make contact with us NOT put up barriers once they finally decide they want to connect with us.