Challenge

I am a Product Manager of a real time payments service (let us call it xPS) for a centralized Payments  Infrastructure organization in India. xPS was used predominantly used by Banks for facilitating  interbank funds transfer of retail banking customers.

While the xPS had been growing very well across all other channels, I had major challenge of getting  customers to use the xPS service in the mobile banking channels.

Selection

I had discussed extensively with the stake holders at various banks, to figure out, why the  transactions were not growing in the mobile banking app channel. Few of the Bank partners were  taken into confidence and they shared their transaction volumes, activation rates, usage of various  alternative funds transfer mechanisms in their mobile banking app as well. Few of the Banks also  shared the success/failure of increase in the transactions when they tweaked their applications.

I had gathered all the necessary data of “What was going on”. But we could not figure out “Why it  happens” so.

I decided to go back to the drawing board, to retrace the customer journey of their mobile app  usage behaviour.

I chose visualization as a tool because I had a strong hunch that I may get some insights of customer  behaviour if I trace the journey visually, from the customer’s perspective.

Application

I decided to draw the customer journey step-by-step across various mobile banking applications that  had integrated xPS as a part of their service offerings.

Screen shots of every page of the mobile banking app, right from the home screen were extracted  and compiled into a PowerPoint slide. Comments and annotations were made in the respective  slides, where I felt, it can improve the understanding of the viewer.

To compare, I also took the screen shots of the customer journey of the Internet Banking login of the  banks.

In a week’s time, I had multiple PowerPoint presentations describing the customer journey of all the  major Banks for both mobile banking app and Internet Banking login. I presented it to the other  stake holders in the team (Technology, Operations teams, Relationship Managers of the Banks)

We categorized the presentations into multiple buckets – Banks who had a high volume share of xPS  transactions vis-à-vis other alternatives; Banks with the least volume share of xPS transactions and  so on.

Insight

When we analysed the customer journey visualization across different banks who had higher volume  share of xPS transactions, one thing became clear. The Bank mobile banking app menu had xPS as the  first option in the menu under Funds Transfer options. We also saw whoever Banks had highlighted  the benefits of xPS over other Funds Transfer options (eg. Real time, 24x7 service etc), the volume  share improved. The Banks who had the least volume share, had xPS as the last option in the menu.  Banks who did not provide necessary help, explanation of xPS also had low volume share.

The Customers of the Bank were choosing whatever was first in the menu under Funds Transfer  options and whenever the Bank nudged them to try xPS they did follow the Bank’s advice.

This insight helped us create a “Best Practices document for mobile banking “and had listed down a  list of Do s and don’t s and shared with all the Bank partners to implement as soon as possible.

Banks were able to see the transaction volumes jump immediately, when the Best practices were  implemented.

Approach

While the Visualization tool helped us to draw every step of the customer journey, to gather the  insights, we have also decided to use the other design thinking tools along with Visualization.

Mind mapping is another innovative way to solve complex problems by involving a group to work  towards identifying insights and their interconnectedness. Mind mapping exercise done with teams  not connected to the problem also helps to eliminate confirmation bias and bring fresh perspective to  the insights.

