Reflection – Learning Launch

The Challenge and Selection:

I am part of the Financial Services - Asset Management Industry, where one of the critical service  offerings is to provide the customers with a financial statement reflecting their investments with us at  regular intervals or on request. Over a period of time, due to frequent Regulatory changes and Customer  requests, various modifications had been incorporated in the statement in an ad-hoc manner. These  changes resulted in the financial statement becoming complex and unwieldy, resulting in the customers  contacting our various points of service for information though the information was already available in  the financial statements. This in turn was putting pressure on our servicing team resulting in a delay in  response and impacting our overall customer experience.

This made us realize that it was time to review the entire design, layout and content of our financial  statement and reducing customer queries at the various points of service.

As part of the “What is “and “What If” framework, we had a series of workshops across a diverse group  of stakeholders both internal and external and arrived at the design criteria where the customers had  expressed the requirement of following a design and layout similar to what their “Bank Statement”  would look like. As they were familiar with reading a Bank Statement, if our statement had a similar look  n feel it would help them locate the required information and eliminate the need of contacting our  organization.

As part of data gathering, we not only leveraged on the financial statements of our competitors but also  of the Banking Industry. In addition, we had a series of brainstorming sessions and came up with 4  prototypes of the financial statements for testing with our stakeholders. We were now ready to embark  on the 3rd stage of the framework which was “What Works” using the “Learning Launch” tool to test our  hypothesis and assumptions.

Application

As part of Learning Launch 1.0, we planned to present the 4 financial statement prototypes to various  cross segment of customers. For this exercise, we created 6 groups with 5 members in each group with  each group representing a unique customer segment. The objective was (i) to test if the assumption of  designing the statement similar to a bank statement would facilitate ease of reference of information  thereby reducing investor queries and (ii) include/delete information in the statement basis customer  feedback. (iii) Filter down the prototypes to 1 or 2 at best, in case we met the design criteria to some  extent.

Post this workshop, as we had met the design criteria to some extent, we proceeded towards Learning  Launch 2.0. Here, basis the feedback and inputs received from Learning Launch 1.0, we finalized on 2  prototypes and similar to AB Testing, we circulated both the prototypes to a larger segment of investors  across all 6 customer categories. Here, the customers who were frequently contacting the points of  service were selected for this workshop. Prior to commencing, we also communicated the new design

layout and changes to the selected investors. The workshop was carried over a period of 1 month to  collate feedback along with data, to confirm if the number of customer queries from the respective  categories had reduced.

Insights

By adopting this framework, we were able to arrive at a final design layout which was addressing most  of the requirements of the investors and also validated our assumption. In addition we observed the  number of queries had reduced.

Also, we realized that presenting multiple “Visual” prototypes of the proposed financial statements was  very useful in highlighting the changes and soliciting feedback vis a vis providing textual information.

In addition, ensuring all stakeholders are included in the Design Criteria stage and having a diverse group  of customers during the Learning Launch phase was critical for the success of this initiative in a time and  cost effective manner.

Also, communicating the changes in advance was a key learning to ensure the investors were aware of  the changes and had not caught them by surprise, as it would have resulted in an increase in customer  queries.

Approach:

We plan to use the framework of design thinking and the various tools to drive such initiatives in future,  where the human interface is high and we are not clear on the requirement and solution. In addition will  ensure that relevant stakeholders are included during the design criteria stage and Learning Launch is  first conducted as a pilot project before testing with the actual customers.

Also a key learning is that proactive and well designed “Communication” of any new idea is critical for its  success.

