'fhios' recommendations where accurate and insightful and delivered the increase in customer click through we needed'
Interactive Services Manager, e-Marketing HSBC
fhios’ Mystery Visitor research program is employed by some the UK’s largest retail banking groups to look at customer perceptions of the competitive performance of online business and personal banking channels. Research gathered on a monthly basis from large-scale samples recruited across the UK allows the tracking of changes in customer ratings and attitudes as new functionality, content and design features are added.
fhios employs its Mystery Visitor research methodology to assess the web sites of the nine leading personal banking groups in the UK. Mystery Visitor gathers user experience data on several competing or peer group Internet sites comparatively scoring them across a range of critical usability metrics known to have a significant influence on user’s propensity to re-visit a site, register for services or make purchases.
Web based questionnaires are used to capture quantitative and qualitative customer data from a representative sample of participants who visit the client’s site and a number of competing sites to rate them across a range of metrics as well as providing verbatim feedback. This is then combined with an expert usability appraisal to provide context for the participant’s ratings and to allow the identification of successful and unsuccessful features, functions and design strategies.
The long-term use of Mystery Visitor in the competitive benchmarking of the HSBC personal and business sites allowed fhios to develop a range of design recommendations that once implemented led to 10-20% improvements in customer ratings of critical metrics including intuitiveness of design, navigation and ease of contact.