Why aren’t banks and consumers engaging with our software?
A national financial software provider had acquired an ‘Account Opening’ application but was having major issues integrating, deploying and managing it within their existing suite of software offerings.
From our research we discovered consumers would abandon the process because they didn’t have the right credentials at hand while employees encountered glitches that occurred after an account was submitted for their review. Several credit unions and banks were threatening to abandon the software altogether and migrate to a competitor’s platform.
Activities
- Kickoff Workshop
- Baseline User Testing / In-Depth Interview (Consumers)
- Contextual Inquiry (Employees)
- Affinity Diagramming
- Wall Walk
- Opportunity Prioritization Workshop
- Prototype Testing
- Case Study
- Financial
- Engagement Type
- B2C & B2B
Approach
We recruited 12 consumers who had recently opened bank accounts and gave them dummy information to go thru the account opening process using the client’s software and one of three competitors software. We also met with 6 different credit union and bank groups and conducted contextual inquiries with 10+ employees to see their account opening administration/management processes using the client’s software.
Data Synthesis
We created an affinity diagram from over 700 data points to determine where the most pain points occurred during the entire account opening process (discovery, initial setup, processing, confirmation, post-submission, welcome, etc.) While most consumers just needed a simple process flow that spelled out exact requirements (like home address and DL#) many of the administration features were severely lacking or too convoluted for most bank employees to use without extensive training. Destructive errors would occur if data entry and validation was not completed in a specific order of operations.
We conducted a wall walk workshop with the client to present the initial findings and gather opportunities.
Output
The day after the wall walk exercise we hosted an opportunity prioritization workshop where we compiled, ranked and plotted opportunities based on value to user, value to business and development lift. The entire team determined which features should be considered MVP for a prototype.
We then constructed a prototype based on the new opportunities that addressed both the consumer and employee-facing versions of the software. We then tested users with the prototype, which users and employees had little to no trouble completing and processing a new account.
This led to a complete build-out of the new software which performed much better for both customers and banking employees.
