How Santander succeeds with qualitative conversion optimisation

As a leading consumer finance supplier in Finland, most of Santander’s sales are conducted online. But there was a problem: large amounts of customers were dropping out during their online loan application process. This new process needed to work better for customers if the bank was to meet its goal of creating a best-in-class online application flow and decreasing their drop-off rate.

Santander wanted to get early customer reactions to discover any potential weaknesses in their proposed solution. Santander was experienced with conducting usability tests, but this time they wanted some additional help in conducting more comprehensive user research.

The primary study identified a few highly critical issues that Santander was able to quickly address. After another round of iteration, the updated application was then presented to a new round of participants. For the second study, UserTribe recruited a sample of non-Santander customers to get a fresh perspective on the process.

Santander plans to conduct more usability research as new features are added. More than anything, the bank has developed a new way of working that more closely incorporates customer feedback. “Your process made usability testing quite easy for us,” explains Usko. “Before, there was a lot of hassle in conducting user research, but your process and approach were much more useful and easier for us.”