Legal & General sees profit in user-friendly website
15th June 2006
Setting up a user-friendly website saw Legal & General's sales and online traffic figures surge and also made savings in maintenance costs.
Last year, Legal & General, one of the UK's leading financial services companies, decided to explore the possibility of expanding its online life insurance website to make it more accessible for disabled users.
They assembled a team to decide what they wanted the site to do and how it might be achieved. They also brought in key stakeholders and disabled people to advise on the best possible approaches. The team quickly identified some real challenges, such as insurance industry jargon, difficult and sometimes imposing content and PDFs and JavaScript elements that weren't easily converted into new formats.
Legal & General consulted disability groups, tested their prototypes with potential users and generated new accessibility guidelines and monitoring tools. They then produced an accessible and sustainable site that suited all of Legal & General's needs.
The results have been impressive. The new site has almost doubled the number of visitors seeking quotes and buying insurance packages online. It has also cut maintenance costs by 66 per cent and provided a 100 per cent return investment in under 12 months.
Legal & General says the site, which is in the process of being accredited by both RNIB/AbilityNet and the Shaw Trust, has increased search engine traffic, decreased content management workload and loading time, and improved the site's Google ranking. It's also improved browser compatibility for more than 13,000 visitors per month without a single complaint. They say they're now working to expand their other websites to implement their new accessibility standards.