Websites are the most widely used touchpoint for credit cardholders interacting with their providers. The quality of a credit card company's secure website impacts the relationship that firm has with its customers. To understand the state of card issuers' digital services, Forrester has just released our 2012 US Credit Card Secure Website Rankings. We found that:

• Discover leads the pack with exceptional service features and valuable transactional functionality. With a score of 80 out of 100, Discover received the highest overall score among the six credit card issuers whose websites we evaluated. The firm earned a whopping 91 in our online servicing category, as well as an impressive 84 in our transactional content and functionality category.

• eBusiness teams at card issuers have room to improve in cross-selling and usability. Although the websites we looked at revealed strong digital services among credit card issuers overall, our benchmark also uncovered opportunities for improvement, specifically in the areas of user experience design and secure website cross-selling. eBusiness teams need to enhance their websites’ navigation, task flow efficiency, and location cues while improving the contextual cross-selling & upselling on the secure site.

• Digital rewards management tools and merchant-funded rewards will be critical to future success. Today, pure-play card brands like American Express and Discover lead in terms of innovative partnerships and cross-touchpoint offers for cardholders. American Express offers exclusive options to clients via partnerships with Twitter and foursquare, as well as the ability to “share” rewards points digitally with other users. As eBusiness teams at other card companies move toward next-generation digital initiatives, they will begin to roll out their own innovative rewards options.   

What do you think are the most important features on credit card websites?