As the pandemic hit, an online banking offer became an immediate necessity for all banks. More importantly, however, in the gloom that people reported feeling through the different lock-downs, it was important to also be able to humanise the otherwise cold online banking experience. We approached the first problem by creating remote sales alternatives to all on-site sales flows. To allow for warmer communication, instead, we added a chat function to the platform, complete with audio/videocall and screensharing capabilities.

Breif

Our client had already invested extensively in offering a complete home banking experience, making most products available for purchase on the mobile channels. However, there was no system in place to allow for the Relationship Managers (RM) to conduct the online sales or promote products. Until this point the banking platform had been designed exclusively to provide selling flows for in-person sales.

Furthermore, the only channel the RM’s had to communicate with the customer was over the phone. We took not-yet-implemented plans for a chat functionality and improved upon it, making it both more empathetic and more useful to the customer.

Team

II was the main designer responsible for these features, but throughout their implementation I worked with a varying set of collaborators in team. This included:
· Senior UX Designer
· UI Designer
· Front-end Developer
· Back-end Developer

Process

Quick-and-dirty for the lowest time-to-market

The first approach to tackle this problem was a quick-win solution, designed to allow the RM to request and send documentation to the client. It reduced the sales flows to its bare minimum: request documentation to ensure viability (as in the case of loans), to then send contracts detailing the product or service and have them signed, scanned and sent back.

Deemed a quick-and-dirty solution, it meant to reduce the time-to-market to the maximum while a mobile version of the missing sales flows was developed. In the meantime, a more advanced remote flow would also be developed, one that allowed the RM to be the one to configure and sell the product, instead of the customers buying them autonomously.

Remote proposals

The “remote proposals” were designed to introduce online sales for the first time to our client’s sales platform. The existing sales flows consisted in steps-based configurations of the product, where the client’s input could be continuously requested through a special interactive screen, and this same device would later be used to sign digitally. In order to save costs on development, we tried keeping the same system in place and merely redirecting the interaction from an offline customer to an online one.

In our new flow, any accordion in any sales flow could be sent as an online request of documents or information to the customer. This meant modifying the flow to function asynchronously, such as to not need a virtual meeting or limited timeframe to complete a sale.

Reaching customers

The work done in the context of making the products available to the customer solved a commercial need. But our client understood that more could be done to establish a relationship of trust in the new crisis-hit context. This is where the communication systems needed improvement. An evolution of the chat system was implemented, bringing not only the possibility of turning impersonal chats into actual video calls, but also adding screensharing. We can never underestimate the impact of a human voice answering the phone, or a human face appearing in the video call, to help us with a problem.

In my experience, it was also clear that screensharing makes all the difference in the customer experience, letting the RM see exactly what the Customer is seeing on their end, they can provide contextual and specific help, bringing the Relationship Manager’s assistance closer to that of a dedicated IT consultant and just as effective.