Global Financial Services Company

Upleveling a product that's all about great service

Summary

A leading global financial services company had a credit card that was centered on exceptional customer service.

The division managing this card had already set themselves apart with their remarkable service to cardholders across the globe. Unfortunately, the methods used to earn that stellar reputation were inefficient, stalling their growth efforts and causing them to miss opportunities to delight customers and build brand loyalty.

We partnered with this leading global financial services company to streamline their internal product development process, build a powerful system for agents who provided white-glove service to these elite cardholders, and get it to market in a third of the time (and half of the cost) they planned for themselves.

Services

Agents wanted to be more proactive in engaging customers in magical and personalized ways.

Challenge

Our client needed help upleveling a product that was all about great service.

Large, multinational corporations often have long, tedious, and siloed internal development systems, prolonged by exhaustive documentation and planning. This culture existed with our client, and it became clear to their team — after already spending a substantial amount of money and time writing requirements for a new system meant to improve the workflow of agents who serviced the elite cardholders — that they needed help.

Elite cardholders delight in superior service. Our client provides each cardholder with a dedicated concierge they can contact directly to meet their specific needs — whether that’s dealing with a stolen passport or making dinner reservations. Agents provide value by saving their cardholders time and money, but they also needed the ability to work more efficiently behind-the-scenes. Agents wanted to be more proactive in engaging customers in magical and personalized ways, like sending flowers before a known anniversary or offering a tailored trip idea based on noted preferences.

Hundreds of global premium service agents were managing up to 100 clients a piece through several disjointed internal systems, including traditional email and spreadsheets. The financial services company wanted to centralize their information, provide streamlined workflow to agents, and quickly offer personalized, high-level service to their clients.

They projected several years of product development efforts to achieve their goals.

Approach

To level up their services, we workshopped with their production team, subject-matter experts, and leaders from various divisions to build a system that worked for everyone.

Through rapidly prototyping a new, conceptual software system, we worked together to take a muddy idea and find clarity, along with alignment on goals and an understanding of what was being built and why. A week after the workshop, we turned sketches into a visual prototype of the future system, communicating about 80% of what our client had been working on for nearly a year.

The leading global financial services company partnered with us long-term to help bring the concept from prototype to reality. Working shoulder-to-shoulder with the client’s product management and technical teams, our designers, developers, and strategists helped create and launch a product in less than a year at half the cost of similar projects the client had launched in the past.

“Love the ease to find a card number – previously if I’m working on email I have to go find the card number for my client manager in a spreadsheet or rolodex card then pull up the profile – this is great.”

Consumer Relationship Manager

results

We delivered a better, faster way to manage relationships with their high-value customers.

The new product greatly improved the internal customer experience and, in turn, vastly improved the external customer experience.

This endeavor set a new standard for the company’s broader product development process. Our approach required radical collaboration, rapid prototyping, and constant testing, which ultimately shifted the company’s mindset from product “launchers” to product “managers.”

The story of our partnership isn’t over. We continue to work together today, strengthening their internal product teams and brand by defining and solidifying the standards around how their family of products look and function. Before our client invests in new product builds, our design-minded strategists work with them to explore and validate concepts inside and out. We help them design better experiences for their customers and agents, guarding them against market disruption.

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