Peer-graded Assignment: Reflection

Tool Used: Visualization

Challenge

I work for a bank based in the middle east and I am part of the personal loans product team. As part of  the unit responsibility, we are required to offer a best in class personal loan proposition to our customers  through various channels such as branches, sales team and online channels. One of the challenges we face  is customers are required to visit the branch multiples times to complete the formalities and  documentation before they are sanctioned the loan. This is particularly a concern during the current  COVID-19 situation where we are required to maintain social distance and with minimum number of bank  branches open during the lockdown.

Our specific challenge is to minimize the number of times the customers need to visit the branch. The  ideal scenario would be one visit and the loan would be sanctioned

Selection

We decided to use the visualization technique so we could breakdown the complex problems by way of  extrapolation inductive reasoning. The technique was selected to assist us in thinking about possibilities  that we haven't yet seen ad allowed all the stakeholders to learn from each other in the process of defining  the scope, boundaries, key elements, and relationships between elements to consider when identifying  pain points and opportunities for improvements or solutions.

Application

In terms of application of the visualization tool, we first identified all the stakeholders involved and in this  case it was the branch staff and the credit underwriting team. We started off by creating a process map  of all customer touch points and what happens after every step. We also assigned the approx. time/days  it takes to during each process to understand the bottlenecks and why we would need to customer to visit  the branch once again. One example of the process may we drew was as follows:

Insight

Based on the visualization tool used, we were able to identify the reasons why customers are required to  come to the branch multiple times and one other unintended outcome was we were able to identify  bottlenecks which could be resolved there by also improving turnaround time.

We identified customer need to visit to branch at least 2 times as it takes a few days for the credit  underwriting team to assess if the customer is eligible for a loan or not. Once the assessment is done, the  customer is required to visit the branch again to fill up the from and provide the necessary documents.

The approach assisted us to work out a solution where we were able to inform the customers during the  first visit if the loan is approved or rejected hence eliminating multiple visits. The solution obviously  required the IT Team to automate a few process for us and we again used the visualization technique of  storyboarding to explain what we wanted to do from a customer’s perspective. The storyboard used was  as follows:

Approach

Since it was the first time applying the visualization tool to solve an issue, the technique was used in  conjunction with tradition methods such as conference calls and trying to identified the bottlenecks over  e-mails. Looking at the efficiency of how we were able to get to the bottom of issues very quickly and have  an alignment across the stakeholders in the room, I would definitely try to be use the visualization method  consistently throughout the entire process.

