Designing the future experience for existing mortgage customers at a leading European bank

| minute read
  • Crafting the vision for future services using a human centred design approach to meet customer and client goals through a 3-year transformation.
  • Creating capacity, leveraging capability, and improving future experiences for customers, brokers and colleagues.

The challenge: 

This European high street bank, with a multi-channel mortgage operation, working across 3 major brands across branch, online, intermediary and traditional telephony, were beginning a three-year transformation programme due to:

  • Limited self-service options for customers.
  • Manual intervention required for all back-end processes.
  • Siloed contact channels with limited choice for customers and long wait times.
  • Unleveraged IT and digital services capability available within their wider Group.
  • Lack of digital customer channels or a data driven workflow and decision engine which meant that the customer experience was fragmented, slow, non-personalised and limited.
  • Lack of growth due to capacity/high operational costs.
  • New Consumer Duty regulation and cost of living crisis.

What we did: 

During a rapid 9-week period we worked with the bank to create a number of service blueprints covering the end-to-end mortgage journey for existing customers. We defined the required capabilities across people, process, and systems. We then created example future customer journeys for several high impact areas, including product switch and further lending, across both direct and intermediary channels. Finally, we created a suite of assets to support the inhouse delivery teams to prioritise and implement the changes, these included:  

  • Experience and requirements report – includes a catalogue of 170+ requirements.
  • High-level service design – includes 3 service blueprints, 3 tube maps, 1 service pattern treatment framework, 1 information architecture, 3 registration flow processes and 3 experience storyboards.
  • Design roadmap – high-level roadmap to move from high-level design to ensure effective development and business value.
  • Success factors – key drivers metrics were identified to ensure the resulting service delivered the strategic objectives, including increasing customer retention and lifetime value.

The results: 

We’re proud to have created a vision for the transformation of existing services that have restricted the client’s growth. Those services are manual and expensive, with a fragmented user experience. Our vision will create a simplified, lean, automated operation with improved customer and colleague experience.

The creation of a compliant and evidenced-based user experience will further support the bank in their Consumer Duty readiness. The vision enables exceptional customer journeys that both support great outcomes, while managing the needs of customers in vulnerable situations, and those more complex customer cases.

Our work with the Bank identified a significant number of service integration and enhancement opportunities within their existing mortgage platform, and the fast pace of delivery meant that the Bank could meet their challenging change and release schedule.

Most importantly, the creation of the validated vision has significantly improved stakeholder alignment and engagement, serving as a catalyst for business change, while reducing the risk of fragmented services and processes.