The nascent discussion site Quora is already making its mark in financial services among banking companies that want to take online customer service beyond their own websites.
Today, many customers already are in the habit of posting a question for the masses on Twitter, ignoring the option of starting a one-on-one conversation with a bank representative. Quora, a more structured online discussion site founded by former Facebook Inc. employees in April 2009, provides yet another channel for customer service.
Forcing those conversations to happen at the bank's website "does not reflect how people live and work," Bill DeRouchey, the creative director for Simple Finance Technology Corp., the nonbank online banking provider behind BankSimple.com. "Our marketing strategy is to be open to customers, and if they perceive Quora as a place to get answers from, we will use this as a vehicle."
DeRouchey said it is an outmoded way of thinking to assume banks would lose control of a conversation if they sent their consumers to a third-party site — the bank has to go to where potential customers are.
"I don't think we need to have the customer interaction within the BankSimple domain," he said. BankSimple has yet to launch, but has signed up about 20,000 preregistered online banking customers.
The concept of an online question-and-answer forum is not new in the financial services industry. Defunct personal financial management provider Wesabe Inc. sold software to allow banks and credit unions to host discussion groups on their websites. Intuit Inc.'s Mint has an active answers section, where its community responds to questions on personal finance.
Some of Wesabe's customers were credit unions that said they were drawn to its discussion group component because it could emphasize the institutions' sense of community and allowed members to interact with one another online.
With Quora, by contrast, there is an expectation that questions are being addressed by experts. For example, Michael Jordan has answered questions about basketball; Steve Case, questions about AOL Inc. (Quora did not respond to requests for comment.)
"There is a lot of value [with Quora] when it comes to business, mainly from knowledge groups," Frank Eliason, Citigroup Inc.'s senior vice president of social media, said in interview on Jan. 5. "My team is looking at ways to utilize this." Though Eliason said he had answered banking questions on Quora, he said he was not yet convinced of its larger applications for Citi.
"What makes [Quora] exciting right now is the quality of answers and the caliber of the participants," Eliason wrote Jan. 11 on his personal blog, Time to Be Frank.
Jacob Jegher, senior analyst for Celent, said he thought the quality of the questions and answers, plus the presence of a rating forum, made Quora far more organized than some of its peers, and thus potentially of greater use to banks.
"The problem is … you have less control and you have a different user experience and a different look and feel," from a discussion hosted within a bank site, Jegher said. One way around that, ultimately, would be for Quora to integrate with bank websites to provide answers, he said.
Jegher said BankSimple was making good use of Quora as a free marketing tool. "BankSimple is doing a great job using Quora to get their message out without having a live product," he said.
For example, BankSimple's chief executive, Joshua Reich, responded personally to a recent Quora post asking about its automated teller machine fees.
Some industry observers were more skeptical that Quora could be useful to banks in the long run.
"It is just not being used by people in a way that supports a business purpose for banks," said Ron Shevlin, a senior analyst at Aite Group LLC. "To post a very specific question about a bank on Quora, why not just ask the bank?" Shevlin said that financial institutions were inundated with new social media tools, and they have to assess each one carefully.
"I can't imagine any bank that does not do something with Quora in the first or second quarter of 2011 will be hurting," Shevlin said.
Other industry experts said that Quora was tapping into a significant "crowd-sourcing" trend that is likely to be an important part of the way consumers continue to interact online, particularly as they grow weary of the limited answers derived through search engines like Google, which depend on algorithms, not people. Quora is addressing "the gap that is left by search [engines] right now," said Andy Smith, founder of the consultancy and advisory practice Vonavona Ventures in Lafayette, Calif., who said Quora's style of answering questions was much more "humanistic" than either Google or Wikipedia.
