Self-service in Retail Banking
Consulting research project with Salesforce aimed at understanding low self-service adoption in retail banking sector. Over 150+ participants worldwide.
Company
Salesforce
Timeline
Jan 2023 -
May 2023
Team
3 UX Researcher
1 Project Lead (ME)
Tools
SurveyMonkey, Card Sorting, Diary Studies
My Role
👩💼 Stakeholder Engagement: Keep clients engaged throughout the research process, progress updates, requirement explorations, etc.
🔍 Mixed-Method UX Research: Led qualitative and quantitative user research studies with over 150+ participants
🗣️ Storytelling: Synthesized research findings into a report, including recommendations to the clients; crafted a story for the final presentation
This project highlights my ability to coordinate different stakeholders and research teams, craft storys based quantitative data from research.
Context
Self-service options in retail banking are designed to provide customers with a convenient, efficient, and quick way to access their banking services 24/7. Those options include:
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Online Credit Card Application
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Chatbots
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Transactions
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FAQs……
Heavy investment vs. low adoption
$12 billion
Banks have invested heavily in their current Digital channel applications. JP Morgan Chase invests $12 billion in technology annually
-10%
But still, user adoption and satisfaction rate are much lower than what's expected, and customers are still following the traditional support channels.
Problem
Client Goal:
Understand why self-service in Retail Banking has low adoption
we ask
Research Goals:
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Learn about users’ needs and expectations
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Understand what leads to low adoption
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Identify features and offerings that can drive adoption of self-service
✍️ Key term definitions:
Users completing a certain task solely by themselves and on their own devices, without assistance from a human customer representative
also known as consumer banking or personal banking, is the provision of services by a bank to the general public
Include but not limited to Online Credit Card Application, Chatbots, Transactions, FAQs, etc
🔍 Target User Segment:
Young adults aged 18-30 based in US who use major banking services
❓ Why 18-30?
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They are more tech savvy
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Existing high adoption rates in other verticals in self-service
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Convenient sampling
❓ Why major banks in the US?
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More access to on-site research
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Different countries have different banking systems and average adoption of self-service
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JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America, etc
Process
To explore people’s usage of self-service in retail banking, I outlined three research methods: survey, interviews, and diary studies. These methods were chosen as they would allow us to gain a more holistic understanding of users’ experiences, expectations, and obstacles associated with self-service utilization.
💡 Survey
70+ Participants
Young working professionals & students
1. Reason: Why survey?
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collects extensive data within a short period of time
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serves as a screener for interview participant recruiting
2. Survey Design:
The survey is roughly divided into two parts:
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basic demographic questions (location and profession), as well as interview screener questions
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delves deeper into one’s usage of self-services in retail banking:
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how often they use banking (self) services
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which specific features they find most useful
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which aspects of self-service banks could improve upon
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3. Findings:
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90% of users only use basic one-step self-service options
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56% of users are unable to locate desired information
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59% of users demand improvement in ease of use
💡 Interview
12 Participants (1 pilot + 11 interviews)
Young working professionals & students
1. Reason: Why interview?
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yield rich qualitative data to couple with the quantitative data we got from the surveys.
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delve deeper into their usage of self-service solutions and uncover specific incidents they encountered
2. Format: Pilot + following interview, semi-structured, cognitive walkthroughs
Before conducting in-depth interviews with a large number of participants, I designed the interview script and conducted a pilot interview to observe how the participant respond to the questions.
🔍 Pilot interview
45 minutes in person
diminishing returns due to repetitive questions, which ceased to generate valuable insights
changed to
🖥️ Following interviews
30 minutes over Zoom
edited our script to follow the natural flow: self-service adoption situ generally -> in retail banking -> incident walkthroughs
3. Key Questions:
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How would you describe your level of financial literacy?
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When we talk about self-services in retail banking, what comes to mind?
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Could you tell me about an incident where you encountered difficulties while using banking self-services?
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What is one feature that you wish your bank had, self-service wise?
4. Synthesize
I led an affinity mapping activity to synthesize a large amount of qualitative data collected from interviews:
4. Insights:
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Conflicted Sentiment on Security Verification Process
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Necessary but troublesome!
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Reliance on Expertise and "Better Deals"
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Omni Channel / Cross-System experience needs great improvement
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More difficulties with international clients
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The desire for an aggregated dashboard
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a holistic analysis of their spending, function to allows them to pay the bills one stop
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Aversion toward Chatbots / Virtual Assistants
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the triaging process and command comprehension
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– Bank of America Customer, 26
I didn't even know the annual fees could be waived until the agent at the branch told me that I could open a college checking account so that I don't have to pay the annual fee!
💡Diary Studies
7 Participants
Students, Designers & Researchers
In order to observe how participatns interactv with self-service channels, I designed a diary studies activity:
1. Reason: Why Diary Studies?
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the other two research methods required participants to recall specific events. As a result, the accuracy of the incident or the event described could be compromised
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Hence I invited users to document their interactions with banking self-services as the event unfolded
Insights:
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Adoption: limited to one-step, passive interactions
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Success: 95% success rate, 90% accomplished within 2 minutes
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User Suggestions:
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Search function within the offer list
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Automate paying credit card bills
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More fine-tuned transaction filtering
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💻 Deliverables:
1. Research Report:
2. Presentation
I crafted a 10-minute compelling narrative and presented it to the stakeholders, including our client, sponsors, and relevant banks representatives.
Impact & Learnings
✨ Impact
We consolidated our findings and recommended possible avenues to redeem this problem into a report. We also crafted a story for a 10-minute presentation to our client. Findings have been / will be used to:
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Confirm and solidify existing findings
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Challenged assumption re: low usage of self-service
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Provide deeper insight into consumers aged 18-30
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Inform the next steps & direction for the Salesforce team
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Already off to the research team working on this problem!
- Salesforce Sr. UX Designer
This research project delved deep into the self-service adoption circumstances in America, with promising recommendations that we will deliver to our research team.
✨ Learnings
While we are synthesizing our interview findings, because we have a large amount of interview data, the process becomes extremely important - it's almost like re-telling the users' stories. You want to be representative, truthful but also selective. Even for the same feature, users may have different sentiments.
In this scenario, numbers don't always matter (e.g. 8 users indicate they dislike this feature but 1 user indicates they enjoy using it), the rationale behind the sentiment matters. Try to understand what specific features they like/dislike, the rationale and users' specific backgrounds - they may be talking about the same thing :)