Express Healthcare Staffing
THE SITUATION
Express Employment Professionals is a leading staffing and temp agency, running on a franchise model. Already strong in industrial and clerical occupations, they wanted to grow their business in healthcare, especially nursing.
OUR CONTRIBUTION
Express brought us in to research nurses, because our work with Welle and Hikma had built deep empathy with healthcare staff. We interviewed travel and per diem nurses working in 12 states, across levels: licensed practical nurses, registered nurses, and nurse practitioners. We learned about how they feel about their identity, how they choose their jobs, and how they interact with other nurses. And within this ecosystem, we uncovered their expectations of agencies.
THE BENEFITS
We delivered a deep understanding of nurse culture, unmet needs, and the role agencies play today. That gave Express a basis for services competitors don’t offer. While competitors focused on platforms, technology, and medical expertise, Express chose human connection and local knowledge - knowing its customers at a deeper level.
Wells Fargo
THE SITUATION
Wells Fargo’s mortgage business had spent about 12 years planning an upgrade to its lending policy reference materials. The content had fragmented so badly that nobody could tell which conflicting answer was correct. The tech platform was chosen, but the team disagreed on what form the app should take and which features it needed.
OUR CONTRIBUTION
With the project threatening to stall, the tech vendor (SDL) brought us in to break the stalemate. We insisted on watching the mortgage origination teams work, promising not to slow them down. Our ethnographic research surfaced things no one had put in the spotlight before. First, everyone had at least two monitors, sometimes three - so the app could own a full screen instead of a sidebar. Second, the teams worked closely together but held very different roles and experience levels. Some needed an answer fast, mid-phone call; others needed to weigh underwriting criteria carefully. Veterans knew how to get things done; new team members didn’t know where the best practices lived. Borrowing design principles from everyday consumer services like Amazon and Spotify, we helped design an app that felt less like an encyclopedia and more like a team coordination platform, where novices could learn from expert coworkers.
The BENEFITS
New insight and inspiration got the project moving again. A shared understanding of how the teams worked - and how their needs shifted by role and by situation - shaped a flexible, team-oriented platform. Wells Fargo still uses the Tridion platform today, even after RWS acquired SDL.
TIAA
THE SITUATION
TIAA had a serious customer and asset retention problem. Three life events pushed customers to close their accounts, take their money, and leave: job changes, retirement, and the death of an account holder. A 1% improvement in retention was worth more than $300 million in assets under management (AUM) every year.
OUR CONTRIBUTION
TIAA had already invested in a smooth retirement experience, and retirement was what the money was for. So we focused on job changes and death events. We learned how differently people feel about finding a better job (voluntary) and losing one (involuntary). We heard about the emotional rollercoaster of losing a loved one, and how differently each family recovers. From those findings we built customer journey maps, experience design principles, and service innovation concepts that aligned teams across TIAA around these life event experiences.
THE BENEFITS
TIAA beat the +1% retention goal and cleared an obstacle to growth. Since our project ended, AUM has grown 1.6x, from about $930 billion in 2018 to $1.5 trillion in 2026.