Financial Services With Empathy

A task force at this company had determined which life events triggered the greatest asset outflows. They wanted to redesign the customer experiences during these events to increase the retention rate. Improving that rate by just 1% would mean hundreds of billions of dollars retained. So the business case was sound.

Unfortunately, fixing these experiences would require multiple siloed teams to work together. Some of these teams treated the experiences as mechanical transactions, while others had to deal with customers who were upset by the experience. Our first task was to align all the teams in one consolidated effort. By facilitating multi-disciplinary workshops and bringing new insights and empathy from deep ethnographic customer research, we got everyone on the same page.

The teams learned new things about what it felt like to change jobs - how good It felt to find a new job, compared to how bad it felt to lose one. They learned how diverse the reactions can be when families lose loved ones. With this emotional context, and the realization that both of these life events represented cycles, not linear journeys, they were able to design much better experiences, and convince the organization to invest in building them.

Today, this company empowers its customers to make sound financial choices, even during highly-emotional situations in life.