Design Thinking for Innovation - Final Assignment                          November 2020

Challenge​: Describe your challenge, including all relevant information.    I worked in the Financial Services industry in the US from the early 1992’s to 2009. As the Head  of Wema Bank Plc in the Office of the COO, I managed the North America support  functions for Customer Service and Collections operations for various financial products like  Credit Cards, Retail Bank, Mortgage, Student and Auto loans. In 2008, this industry was hit by  the now well-known and notorious financial crisis. This was a pivotal chapter that caused a  paradigm shift in how banks and financial institutions ran their business. From a focus on  offering competitive products and achieving high customer satisfaction, it pivoted to  aggressively driving ​expense optimization initiatives​. This was both essential from a business  sustenance standpoint but also from the PR/ optics side due to the TARP money that had been  afforded to many banks during this time by the US Government. This led to a single track focus  on cost cuts and driving expenses down over the next few years.    Desperate to meet this goal of reducing expenses as much and as quickly as possible, various  business units in my organization unanimously chose the two most obvious (​‘low hanging fruit’​)  solutions: ​Automation​ and ​Outsourcing​. Automating all feasible customer communication  channels (Interactive Voice Response) and outsourcing operations to cost effective locations  (typically offshore). Both of these approaches were tremendous successes as was evident from  the financials at the end of the year. However, we saw a significant decrease in new business  and the sales of the financial products and services we offered declined by over 30% in the  same period. This was a serious red flag as it shook the very foundation of business  sustenance. The Office of the COO issued a directive to pause and analyze data to understand  what was driving this and whether it was related to the expense optimization measures we had  put in place recently. As the Head of PMO, I was tasked with driving this effort to understand the  relationship and dependencies to come up with creative solutions to tackle both expense  optimization and new business.    Selection​: In your own words, briefly describe the tool you selected (e.g., what it is and why you  selected it for your challenge -- including any appropriate video lecture references).    For this exercise, I chose the ​Mind Map​* tool. The organization had employed two strategies as  a ‘​knee jerk/ gut​’ reaction to the industry crisis. While that was solving the immediate problem at  hand of expenses, it was causing repercussions in other areas. To be able to solve this, it was  vital to understand the data and analyze the patterns to understand cause and effect. This  analysis of ‘​what-is​’ was critical to understand the organization’s current reality and hone in on  insights from the data we had. These would form the basis for the ‘​what-if​’ brainstorming phase  that would seek to identify meaningful and creative solutions for the road ahead.     *Design Thinking - Week 3: Idea Generation (Sophie Tolu) and Mind Mapping Tool (Carolyn Martinez)    Application​: Describe how you applied the tool you selected to your challenge (e.g., what you  did and how the tool was applied effectively or ineffectively).

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Design Thinking for Innovation - Final Assignment                          November 2020

I organized this exercise in the following way:    Step 1: Identify key stakeholders - Business Unit Leaders, Finance, Engineering etc.   Step 2: Obtain alignment problem statement (‘​what-is​’) and key data points available  Step 3: Organize focus groups to have an engaging and interactive conversation on the above  Step 4: Summarize key findings, patterns and insights   Step 5: Document design criteria based on the above learnings     The 5 focus groups (one for each line of business) was the most time consuming yet insightful  of the five steps. Participants included representation from all lines of business so as to benefit  from a learning experience while also keeping an eye out for cross functional dependencies and  impacts. The first task was to whiteboard the ​business journey​ from ‘​what-was​’ to ‘​what-is​’.  The group utilized post-it notes to identify the steps taken and how they contributed to the  current reality of the organization. The second task was to whiteboard the ​customer journey ​to  understand how the business journey had impacted and changed the customer experience.  This was important as we needed to understand the cause and effect to be able to derive  meaningful insights. Finally, for the third task, we had a deep dive into the data and analytics  available to quantify the themes and trends we had observed.     Insight​: Describe the insight you gained from applying the tool you selected to your challenge  (e.g., how an insight affected your thinking about the challenge and about design thinking more  broadly).    The quantitative analysis showed that expense optimization initiatives and customer satisfaction  (CSAT) were positively correlated, meaning there was a definitive cause and effect between the  two. There were no perceptible differences between the impact of either Automation or  Outsourcing - they were both complemented by proportional decline in CSAT scores. However,  declining CSAT scores were also observed in smaller lines of business that had not  aggressively employed the expense optimization initiatives. This showed the interconnectivity  and dependence between the different lines of business. This is where the qualitative data from  the focus groups really helped. Customers preferred to talk to an agent rather than an  automated IVR system (evident from the requests to transfer to a live agent data). However, the  CSAT scores were still low despite and after a conversation with the live agent. A focus group  with select customers identified the following contributors: customers with multiple products and  services (eg. a customer with both credit card and mortgage accounts) were kept bouncing  around by the IVR system; customers that talked to a live agent found them wanting of  knowledge and information about highly specialized products (eg. agent in India did not  understand student loans in the US).     The key insights we gained from this exercise was mind blowing. The fundamental problem that  was unearthed was that the organization had approached the problem in a two-pronged way -  business journey and customer journey. This was evident from the visual whiteboard exercise  where multiple misalignments were detected between the two journeys. While expense  optimization is good for the business and the balance sheet, customer satisfaction is what is

Design Thinking for Innovation - Final Assignment                          November 2020

needed for long term sustenance and success of the company. The design criteria that were  formulated included two key elements: higher complexity products and services should be  serviced by Subject Matter Experts, high value (monetary measure) and high breadth customers  (multiple products) should be serviced by a live agent, circumventing the IVR system. These  groundbreaking insights focused our subsequent steps and helped bring together creative and  intuitive solutions that solved both the business and customer problems.     Approach​: Describe what you might do differently next time -- applying the same tool you  selected or a different one -- and the reason(s) why.    While this was a very enlightening exercise, this unfortunately came a bit late in the timeline.  The initial solutions of Automation and Outsourcing were employed with only the business  problem in mind. Had there been a deep dive into the various contributing factors and  dependencies ahead of time, we could have saved a very costly and time consuming effort. This  was a good lesson for the future for me personally about focusing on all aspects of ‘​what-is​’  before delving into the ‘​what-if​’.

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