...It’s Good For The Employee

Ironically, the very intuitiveness of the customer Web interface made the customer service employees wary. How could a system designed for customers be robust enough for on-the-job use eight to 10 hours a day? Dowds and his team overcame that reluctance by turning the customers’ confirmation page into a power user page. Employees can go directly to the summary page that lets customers review and edit information before they confirm a transaction. The internal version of the website also includes two CRM tools: an extensive contact history (customers only see an abbreviated version) and a coaching tool from Epiphany that helps employees suggest relevant tools and services, such as the website’s personal financial planning tool, for a given customer.

Extensive usability testing confirmed that giving employees access to everything they need to help clients through a single Web interface would make their lives easier. As of May, when 90 percent of the Web desktops were scheduled to be fully rolled out internally, toggling between systems became a thing of the past. By the end of 2004, Dowds and his team will have retired at least 12 client/server applications.

By turning the confirmation page into a power user page and adding the two CRM tools, Vanguard was able to reuse about 80 percent of the Vanguard.com interface internally. Besides saving the expense of buying and integrating a third-party CRM system, it greatly simplifies internal system maintenance. Dowds and his team discourage requests to modify the internal page because each variation must be designed, programmed and tested. "The moment that there’s the outside page and an inside variant of that, you lose the merit of a common user interface," he says. "There must be an absolutely justifiable reason for variations."

Painless Processing

One of the most tantalizing benefits of using the Web interface internally is that other channels benefit from the straight-through processing built into Vanguard.com. Although an early version of the site seemed fully automated, customer data still had to be printed out, which triggered a five-step manual process to reenter data into back-end systems before processing a transaction. "It would have been no different than if you had sent it to us through the mail," says Dowds. "From a processing perspective, the effort inside Vanguard was the same."

In expanding the Vanguard.com site, Buckley’s team developed objects that let Vanguard fastidiously apply standard rules at the point of data entry. That way, information customers type online goes directly into the back-end systems with no employee intervention. Similarly, when employees enter data through the Web interface, it too goes straight through instead of triggering a manual, back-office process.