Making online forms as easy as possible

I’m in the process of writing an article for CUES’ CU Management magazine, about KickStart Online Lending Generator and Holy Rosary CU’s results. Editor Lisa Hochgraf had some excellent questions for me which prompted me to do a little bit more research into the universal conclusion that removing barriers and streamlining online forms from the user’s perspective leads to better results and increased sales.

So I thought I would share with you some of the eye-popping research that I discovered (and thus why Carol and Holy Rosary CU are getting wonderful results with KickStart – i.e. 10.49% growth in their loan portfolio over the past 6 months):

• Google’s Marissa Mayer: Speed Wins

• The $300 Million Button

• How Amazon’s website usability affects consumer product choice (This is a lengthy research paper)

In addition to the above research on the importance of streamlining the user/member/customer experience to improve sales, we’ve done some streamlining of our own. One item that proved to ourselves that we get better results when we make things easier online is that when we took the step of pre-filling out our own Online Switch Kit demo for you, dozens and dozens of you tried it out, compared to nearly no one trying it out when it was not pre-filled. It seems simple, but often times the little things can make a BIG difference!

So in our continuing quest to make our own forms and demos even easier to try out, we’ve now also pre-filled out the already-simple KickStart Loan Request form to make it even easier for you to test that for yourself. Kick the tires on KickStart yourself right here: KickStart test site

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this – did you find you got better results when your streamlined your online processes, forms, applications, and navigation? Was there ever a time when making things easier for your members online was a bad thing?

Helping new members make the switch

Online Switch Kits continue to get excellent media coverage. Today, I received an email newsletter from the Northwest Credit Union Association (serving credit unions in Oregon and Washington), and was tickled to see an article on Switch Kits featured. The article is titled Can Switch Kits Increase New Member Satisfaction?

It was particularly happy for me to see this article appear in that trade publication since EverythingCU’s Online Switch Kit was born out of a session I attended at a 2002 CUES conference held in Seattle. There was a breakout session called Switch Kits presented by a credit union marketer from Pinellas County FCU. This breakout session was packed to standing room only. At that time, not many people were thinking about the online world, so it just seemed natural to me to create an online version of what they were writing out by hand, and thus the EverythingCU Online Switch Kit was born.

One point of pride for us with our Online Switch Kit: Since EverythingCU.com serves only credit unions, we have only credit unions as clients of this product. Therefore, the EverythingCU.com Online Switch Kit will NEVER help a person make the switch from a credit union to a bank…. only the “correct” direction, and that is from a bank to a credit union. We do have competitors, but as far as I know, none of them can make this claim.

If you aren’t one of the 112 credit unions already using the Online Switch Kit, what are you waiting for? If you are one, then thank you for your continued patronage and we hope you are seeing terrific usage from it by your new members!