A few months back, a Yahoo user posed a simple question:
How many online passwords do you have? How often do you forget the damn things?
The best answer, as selected by the asker: Too many and all the time.
This reality remains one of the consistently frustrating parts of Web strategy. In trying to deliver better online experiences for advisors and institutions, asset managers face a logic puzzle that can be summed up by three statements:
- Clients want more personalized Web sites.
- Firms can increasingly deliver more tailored experiences IF clients register and login.
- Clients resist registering and logging in.
Over the years firms have tried hard to overcome clients’ resistance. Registration processes have been streamlined. Sites like Oppenheimer’s sell reasons why the user should sign up. But the password challenge lingers – the average person has more than 20 passwords to remember.
The industry hasn’t dug deep to find better solutions. Right now a forgotten password typically kicks off a multi-step process requiring:
- A phone call, OR
- The issuance of a temporary password via e-mail, followed by specification of a permanent password, OR
- Both
It seems very few firms are actively exploring opportunities to make the tracking/recall of passwords easier. Embedding “hint” questions in the registration process and using those to facilitate direct recall of passwords is one option. Enabling users to utilize the login credentials they know best – via OpenID-based services from Google and Yahoo, for example – is another.
The point is – for all the work done to make it easier and more attractive to sign up for sites, less work is being done to make it easier to repeatedly log in time and time again. With all that firms have done to create excellent sites, this is a challenge that warrants more attention.
