The Dropdown That Cost Millions

A few years back, I was working with a team that had built a credit card application for a large US bank. It was the usual - name, address, employment, income, etc. But we'd wired up detailed analytics on every field: how long people spent on it, how often it triggered an error, and — most usefully — what field people where last in when they abandoned.

One field stood out. It was about as boring as a form field gets: a drop-down asking whether the phone number you'd just entered was 'mobile' or 'landline'.

In the previous 12 months - over eleven thousand people abandoned the credit card application on that dropdown field.

Eleven thousand. On a two-option drop-down. My first thought was probalby the sames as yours right now: "that can't be the actual problem, it's too simple a question". I told the team what I've always told clients - Analytics won't tell you what do to, but it will tell you where to look. So we looked at what came immediately after the dropdown - and that's where things got interesting.

If you selected "mobile," you were shown a block of text before you could continue known in the industry as the Mobile Phone Consent. I won't reproduce the whole thing here (it had clearly been written by a lawyer), but the gist was: by providing this number, you agree to let the bank and its affiliates contact you via autodialed and prerecorded calls and texts related to your account.

Read that again the way a stressed-out customer would, mid-application, phone already buzzing with three spam calls that morning: contact me... autodialed... affiliates. That doesn't read like a bank being careful. It reads like a bank asking permission to spam you.

So people closed the tab and abandoned the application. Eleven thousand times in a single year. A credit card for this institution was typically worth between $200 - $300 a year. You don't need a calculator to see this text was quietly costing them millions annually.

Here's the part that still sticks with me. When we asked the bank why that specific text was there, the answer was simple: it was legally required disclosure language, so they could text customers about things like fraud alerts or a late payments to avoid fees. That's a completely reasonable thing to want to tell someone. In fact, its helpful. But it was worded badly. The credit card and customer experience teams at the bank knew the text wasn't great - and had asked to change it. But got a firm push back from legal and compliance. However - once a dollar figure was put on the impact of not changing the text, the teams began to collaborate.

So we worked with the bank and its legal & compliance teams to soften the language (but still remain compliant of course). They changed the text and the abandonment problem at that field disappeared.

Why this one stays with me

The lesson isn't "watch your drop-downs." It's something a little more uncomfortable: when you work inside an industry long enough, its jargon stops sounding alarming to you. "Autodialed and prerecorded/artificial calls" reads like Tuesday to a compliance team. It reads like an impending problem to everyone else.

You are, by definition, too close to your own product to see it the way a first-time customer does. That's not a character flaw - it's just what happens when you spend forty hours a week inside a thing. The fix isn't more expertise. It's less of it, borrowed briefly Hand your digital experience flow to your partner, your parent, a friend who's never worked in financial services, and watch where they hesitate.

Nobody has ever gotten fired for making a disclosure clearer. Plenty of banks have quietly lost millions to one they never bothered to read from the customer's perspective.

This is one of the seventeen design principles from my upcoming book, Designing for Need: The New Rules of Customer Experience in Banking — out September 8. Stay in the loop here.