Bank’s Redesigned Website Includes Crowdsourced Community Support Forum

Commonwealth in Australia is launching a new website with cool new personalization features, and a social media community forum where customers can help answer questions for the bank… and each other.

Comonwealth Bank will debut a website with a dramatically different look later this June. The extensive overhaul is a direct reflection of consumers’ desire for a simplified and less cluttered user experience, the bank says.

Commonwealth promises the website will be more intuitive and personalized. A magazine-style section will provide content based on customers’ key life events and their anticipated needs. One cool new with new addition is the ‘Stuff I Like’ feature, allowing users to star content they like so they search their history and return to it later.

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Drew Unsworth
GM/Online Banking
Commonwealth Bank

The new website integrates data from social interactions, on-site behaviors and browsing history to deliver more relevant offers and tailored information.

“We wrote 1,000 pages of content and brought it back together,” explains Drew Unsworth, Commonwealth’s GM/Online Banking, in an interview.

With the rise in mobile devices, the new website has been completely rewritten with smartphones in mind (presumably utilizing principles of responsive web design). About 50% of the traffic Commonwealth gets on its website currently comes via mobile devices.

( See More: 50 of The Most Spectacular Website Designs in Banking )

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The new website took 12 months to develop. It uses an Adobe CQ5 content management system folded into Amazon Web Services (AWS).

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The old website looked a bit tired and cluttered.

“If you look at our old website, we don’t know who you are, whether you’re a personal or business customer. We’ll just give everybody all the same content,” Unsworth explained. “What we’re trying to do is make it relevant.”

“As you grow a website like this and bolt on things, you discover that it stops being useful for customers with just way too much content,” he added.

( More: Scavenger Hunt Entices Customers To Explore Bank’s Remodeled Website )

Social Media Community Support Forum

Later in July, Commonwealth will roll out the Support Community, where customers can seek support and advice about the bank’s products and services (both retail and business), share insights and participate in discussions.

The system will encourage people to “play an integral role in shaping the future of banking in Australia,” Commonwealth explains.

Customers will be invited to submit posts, vote on topics, and share their opinions. To facilitate the conversations, the bank’s Support Community will include virtual focus groups and a community forum designed to stimulate the free flowing exchange of ideas.

Questions will be answered in real-time by experts from the bank and from the general public. Commonwealth will be encouraging customers to resolve problems among themselves. The bank is basically taking the famous Field of Dreams catchphrase “If you build it, they will come,” and turning it upside down… as long as customers are willing to participate and contribute, the bank can build its new support service.

( More: Customers Crowdsource Innovations for Commonwealth, Then Vote on Them )

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The new website will feature a forum where people can help themselves and each another.

Commonwealth’s Support Community will be accessible from all the bank’s primary online channels: their public-facing corporate homepage, their online banking platform (NetBank), and their Facebook page.

As one of Australia’s most visited websites, Commonwealth feels its web presence should give consumers a bigger voice and more control in the country’s financial dialogue. The bank wants to give them “greater control and access to information that enables them to make informed financial decisions that are relevant to the life stage they are at,” as Unsworth puts it. “This experience needs to be tailored to their needs, serving content that’s applicable to them and not a one-size-fits-all approach.”

“Our launch of Support Community is putting the world’s most advanced technology at our customer’s finger tips and utilizing the power of crowdsourcing to resolve queries in real time,” says Unsworth.

Commonwealth Bank will be the first bank to utilize a social crowdsourcing platform from Lithium. The system is optimized for all online platforms — computers, tablets and smartphones.

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