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Thrivent Financial for Lutherans Drives Greater Online Satisfaction by Focusing on Critical Customer Tasks

Thrivent Financial for Lutherans is a faith-based, not-for-profit financial services organization with nearly 2.6 million members and $61 billion in assets under management. Being membership-owned, Thrivent Financial needs not just to provide financial services information but also to cater for member services, supporting the values of faith, family, and stewardship. It has been innovative in helping members connect with each other with one of the first implementations of online communities.

Thrivent Financial has maintained a strong web presence as a critical component of service delivery for more than a decade, steadily delivering greater functionality and adding more content. The importance of the Web is growing for Thrivent Financial with more and more of its customers and prospects using it to select and compare products, and then find the nearest agent to make a purchase. It knows that the effectiveness of the content on its website is crucial. Financial products have become increasingly complex and consumers have shown a greater interest to research products independently. This led, as with many financial services companies, to a tremendous growth of online content, which was starting to impact usability - for customers and prospects alike.

The revised Thrivent Financial homepage focuses on enabling
customers to complete key tasks

When customers come to a website, they want to complete a task such as to find product information or the location of their nearest agent. In order to make sure that these tasks can be completed, it is critical to be able to Identify them and the phrases that describe them accurately. Getting these words exactly right and organizing content around critical tasks can be the difference between an average-performance website, and a high-performance one.

When setting out to restructure the website, Thrivent Financial took an obvious but surprisingly unusual step; it decided to find out what site visitors wanted to do and what words they used to describe their tasks.

Thrivent Financial decided to employ the Carewords and Task Identification approach, pioneered by Gerry McGovern, a renowned expert in online content. Task Identification starts with a wide range of internal stakeholders creating a broad range of phrases (carewords) that customers look for when they try to complete tasks. The process allows all of the business units to feel fully represented but site visitors determine the relative importance of the tasks. Five percent of tasks typically represent more than a quarter of site activity, so it is critical to identify the top tasks and make them obvious. The process is disciplined, objective, independent and collaborative.

The results of the Thrivent Financial Task Identification project gave the web team evidence of what they, to some extent, already knew - that some tasks needed to be better prioritized while others needed to be de-emphasized. Business units tend to better understand and accept findings if they are independent of subjective preferences and politics. This independent and objective data provided the web team with the authority to proceed with a more customer-centric site design process. Much of the project value gained by Thrivent Financial is the strengthened customer-centricity, a lasting benefit for all parties.

Most of the changes made to the Thrivent Financial website when emphasis was focused on the customer's needs are just as important to the company so both objectives became more aligned:

• The home page was updated with streamlined navigation menus that reduced the number of key paths from twelve to four, creating a much cleaner and less cluttered first impression.
• Customers want to review personal accounts, so the task path was made more prominent, accessible from more places and easier to complete. The results have been extremely encouraging with a significant increase in customers choosing to, and benefiting from, online self-service.
• Current and prospective customers still want to interact with key company representatives and agents. The majority prefer to speak with agents prior to purchasing or amending financial services. The improved transition from website to personal interaction resulted in greater traffic to agents.
• Thrivent has a unique relationship with its customers and the online and offline communities are critical interfaces to members. The streamlined menu system made access to communities far more prominent, thus re-enforcing the trust and bond with members.

As a result of the site upgrade, customer surveys have shown a significant increase in satisfaction metrics and greater volume of transactions on key tasks. While customer success is the only true real metric, feedback from independent review groups rated the new website significantly higher than previous versions. For example, The Web Marketing Association presented Thrivent Financial the 'Outstanding Achievement in Web Development' award; Dalbar, an industry group, awarded its 'Seal of Recognition'; and The Customer Respect Group rated the revised site as 'Excellent', with an industry-leading rating of site navigation.

Read more about how The Customer Respect Group can help you with Task Identification.