Bank of America: Customising contacts pages

Tailored information from a universal link makes for a highly unusual and customised Contact Us service.

The Site

Bank of America’s website is organised in sections reflecting the range of customers for its financial services, from individuals to large corporations, as well as a section about the institution. A secondary utilities bar above the Search panel at the top of pages in all sections includes a Contact Us heading.

Clicking on Contact Us leads to a contacts page specific to the section or, in most cases, the sub-section where the user is currently situated. For example, in About’s Charitable Investments sub-section there is a choice of an e-mail to the bank’s foundation or a phone number for each of five programmes or types of enquiry.

The Takeaway

Bank of America’s contacts service is highly unusual in its level of customisation for different audiences. Given the range of services and company information on its site, such a degree of sophistication requires diligent planning, management and maintenance.

The pay-back for Bank of America is that it can be used both to give service-specific contacts and to vary the contact route offered. So, for example, it can give telephone numbers and e-mails to journalists while offering an FAQ-led page to an enquirer about student banking. In this way it can optimise its use of the web as an initial, and cost-saving, filter on contact enquiries by providing an appropriate response – supplying the information online or passing the enquirer to another channel – in a highly targeted way.

One factor Bank of America might look at to get the most out of the feature is alerting users to its sophistication. Most will not be expecting a universal Contact Us link to be this content-specific.

First published on 19 April, 2005