UX Research: FIS Client Sentiment Study (2022)
Problem
Long-time clients were providing feedback to relationship managers after migrating to a suite of banking products from a different product line that was to be sunsetted. Product leadership wanted to learn more about the cause of client frustrations.
Impact
- Prioritized product roadmaps to align with client feedback. This resulted in improved login and self-service flows that reduced calls to client customer service centers.
- Led to establishing a dedicated UXR team of 6 and grew the UX design team by 20 people to support this suite of banking products at FIS.
- Delivered focused, customer-centric processes and unified client interactions across all stages of the client relationship. This study revealed that clients’ views of these banking products were affected as much by their interactions with the team – from sales to implementations to product to their relationship manager – as they were with the product itself.
Context
Product Leadership was hearing feedback from bank clients about a particular banking product suite and wanted to better understand their frustrations.
Hypothesis: these particular banking products were dated and key features/workflows were in need of UX/UI improvements.
Working Document
Created a collaborative working document where the research plan, questions, raw data, synthesized data, insights and recommendations were housed.
This made sharing progress with stakeholders and pulling together a presentation much easier, as well as providing documentation for any other team members who might be interested in the study.
Research Plan + Prep
Outlined discovery as well as evaluative activities that would carry the research through any redesign efforts.
We knew we needed to start with moderated interviews, but there were other activities that would be appropriate regardless of interview findings, e.g., customer service and sales call analysis, usability tests, journey maps.
Interviews
Coordinated and managed the prep work for the client interview study:
- Work with relationship managers to secure participants
- Follow up with participants to schedule interviews
- Decide what demo site(s) to have available and how to brand them
- Create/approve interview questions
- Set up Usertesting.com tool
- Make sure the facilitator, notetaker, and any observers were scheduled and could access the tool
Synthesis
After interviews with 11 banks and 25 participants, notes and transcript data was imported into Miro.
Stickies with individual data points were grouped by feedback topic, and further synthesized into themes and insights.
Opportunities and recommendations were identified based on data.
Learnings
Created and presented a comprehensive findings and recommendations document to senior product management.
We did find that there were feature/functionality UX that could be improved.
Unexpectedly, we also found that clients' relationships with the sales, implementations, customer service and product teams had as much impact as usability did in their sentiments toward the products.
Insights
Insights were presented with data, quotes and video clips to support the conclusions.
Insights included items that supported the hypothesis that there were UX inconsistencies clients would like to see improved.
Insights also include broader relationship-based and process items that impacted how clients saw the products. This was eye-opening to leadership.
Opportunities
Opportunities and recommendations were more high-level in this case study - half of what we learned had to do with process and client relationship items that went beyond tactical UI or workflow improvements.
One of those opportunities included doing follow up usability testing and dedicated UX team time and effort to ensuring cross-functional strategy as part of the product roadmap.
Next Steps
Next steps were outlined that included some Now, Next, and Later activities.
Now - conduct heuristic reviews and identify UI inconsistencies that could be addressed at any time.
Next - conduct usability testing on what was identified as high-impact flows.
Later - plan to conduct continuous research and client conversations. This recommendation resulted in establishing a dedicated UX Research team for the banking division.
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