CBA to introduce community support forum
The Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA) is giving its website a major face-lift, simplifying the written content and introducing a crowd-sourcing customer support online forum.
Commbank.com.au in its current iteration has been in place for many years, long before social media and tablets came onto the scene, and desperately needed a refresh, according to CBA online banking general manager, Drew Unsworth. The site was also crammed with a slew of information that was hard to digest in its current format.
The new-look website has been 12 months in the making, and will be launched by the end of June. First, the bank had to re-platform the website into the new Adobe CQ5 content management system, and move the hosting of the website out of CBA internally and into Amazon Web Services (AWS).
A Windows 8-esque tiled interface has been put in place on the front page for simpler navigation, and the literature on the website has been dramatically summarised.
"We wrote 1,000 pages of content and brought it back together," Unsworth told ZDNet. "We wrote it mobile first, and depending on what device you view it on, the site will re-render accordingly."
Users can favourite particular pages on the website and share them via social media. CBA is also able to recommend content depending on the user's behaviour.
But the pièce de résistance is the introduction of a community forum, where CBA customers can ask questions and have them answered by either the bank's forum moderators or by other fellow customers. Users will also be able to submit posts and share their own insights related to banking.
The forum, dubbed Support Community, is powered by social crowd-sourcing platform Lithium, and will launch in July.