The cross-functional project team did not begin with a specific problem to solve. Instead, leadership anticipated, there would be an opportunity within the customer authentication process to identify areas for greater efficiencies and cost savings.
To comply with my non-disclosure agreement, I have omitted and obscured confidential information in this case study.
Wall of Knowledge – The UX members of the team began construction of a “Wall of Knowledge.” It was an exercise that helped identify what we knew about our colleague and customer experiences in the context of visiting a branch. The journey board served many stakeholder conversations helping to elicit their knowledge about various parts of the experience. It also helped the team see where we had knowledge gaps that research could help answer.
The Wall of Knowledge board captured the customer and colleague in-branch journeys.
Colleague Advisory Board Ideation Session – The team also conducted working sessions with an internal advisory board. Six (6) sessions with approximately ten (10) bank colleagues per session participated in thirty (30) minute focus groups. The purpose was to ideate how to improve upon a high-level authentication concept, collect colleague insights, and drive colleague buy-in for future authentication process changes.
Teller Interviews – Because leadership anticipated there might be time-savings and efficiencies gained from the teller stations, and the ideation sessions and journey board supported this direction - we set out to understand current in-branch, as well as drive-thru teller processes and pain points. We also wanted to uncover any other servicing methods that are time-consuming for the teller.
The project work-stream aimed to drive value by providing a solution that does the following:
Reduces time spent on repetitive tasks at the teller line, thereby making more time available for tellers to have financial goal conversations with customers
Reduces fraud losses
Improves offer accuracy by pulling back a customer profile vs. transacting account
Promotes customer engagement with the mobile app
To understand the current in-branch and drive-thru processes, tellers use to authenticate customers.
To discover the most common pain-points tellers have during these processes and why.
To uncover any other servicing processes that are usually time-consuming for the teller.
To see if tellers are currently able to spend time deepening relationships with customers and under what conditions make this possible.
The 60-minute remote sessions were conducted over four days. They were one-on-one qualitative interviews asking tellers to reflect on current experiences related to:
Variations in the authentication process and pain points they may experience
Common servicing activities that may yield time savings
Current opportunities to deepen relationships with customers
Five (5) remote teller interviews were conducted with two (2) tellers and three (3) senior tellers. These tellers work out of four traditional branches and one in-store branch located across Ohio & Michigan.
“Pulling up the correct name is frustrating. If we don’t have the full name in, then it can take forever to find somebody. If we try to use a zip code, sometimes it doesn’t take it, so then we’ll have to ask them for their debit card.”
We learned searching for the correct customer profile is challenging and is an opportunity for saving colleagues time. Authenticating a customer isn’t as time-consuming as pulling up the correct profile, especially for a business. Adjust the project focus to solve this issue.
Drive-throughs present customer identification challenges for the colleagues, and picture identification is often unusable. The Auto-identification of a customer that pulls up the correct profile would be a step toward resolving this issue.
Customers needing withdrawal slips take up time inside the branch, as well as in the drive-thru. Consider providing digital deposit and withdrawal slips for customers to fill out ahead of time.
Other time-intensive processes identified by participants were, change orders, cash advances, and various system issues.
“In the drive-thru, I get a view of the car’s windshield, not a view of the driver’s side window. So there’s a lot of glare making it hard to see the customer. I have to watch for the driver to lean out to get the canister in order to see who it is.”
Based on the research and with management’s approval, the team decided to remain focused on the identification part of the authentication process. The difficulty and time needed to search for the correct customer profile were identified as the problem to solve.
Taking some time to gather knowledge from stakeholders and prior research around a project objective is valuable because it provides a foundation from which to launch.
Creating a board to illustrate customer and colleague journeys not only captures known insights but makes it easy for groups of stakeholders to process and spurs conversation that leads to additional knowledge.
I also learned that conducting ideation sessions with colleagues from across the organization provides a wealth of different perspectives and input in a short amount of time. Stakeholder interviews are undoubtedly important and have their place, but in the interest of time, ideation sessions are a good alternative. And both build rapport and support for an initiative.
