Customer Journey Innovation
Home Loan Approval based on customer application data
Client Situation:
The Client was a relative small digital attacker bank that wanted to substantially increase its market share and reduce its unit costs in a sustainable way. The domain of broker-originated Home loans was the core business which required walkthrough on transformation journey and digital enablement.
They saw customer journeys as a way to address the challenges while also contributing to the broader revenue and cost targets.
What we delivered: 12 Weeks - 1 Journey
We executed 12 wk customer journey with a dedicated, cross-functional, agile client team.
The enablement project planned as a 3-month customer journey re-imagination program, started with
Phase 1 - Understand the Baseline scenario (as-is journey)
Phase 2 - Re-imagine the Preferred reality (to-be journey)
Phase 3 - Build a focus on deliverable of a minimum viable product (MVP).
Timeline view for the Project and Workshops as well as the Immersion Sessions
Problem Landscape - Initial Research
(Source: Analysis from CRM data/Stakeholder Interviews)
• Challenges in the submission of standard details for loan application
• Too much of documentation
• Delays in processing time
• Post settlement abandonment
• Miss outs on monthly repayment deadlines
Phase 1 - Understand the Baseline scenario (as-is journey)
The as-is journey phase encompassed ethnographic research (interviews to understand journey & pain points of the customer, brokers, and stakeholders from the loan department) and Customer Experience Strategy, where at a strategic level we defined the clients aspirational goals and a scorecard with metrics for success. Upon conducting extensive customer and broker interviews we mapped current customer and broker journeys where Persona development, Scenario Building and Insights Synthesis were key Design methods that feed into the Journey Map.
Key Customer/Broker Pain-point
(Source: Synthesis from Customer and Broker Interviews)
• Need for regular updates (Broker)
• Know and exercise options for loan application
• Understand validation where application typically go wrong
• Inefficient and inconsistent assessment
• Irregular updates within loan lifecycle (Customer)
• Rewards for loan application
• Unwanted hidden fees
These issues were further prioritized and a high-level solution was brainstormed in Design Thinking workshops. Staging the brainstormed ideas with initial features, were taken to customers for concept testing, where we obtained feedback on the solution design.
The core goal of the phase is to bring the research to life through personas, insight-opportunity frameworks and scenario building for early concepts for a first hand feedback, even before writing a single line of code.
Specific enablement activities: Training sessions on Ethnographic Research, Design Thinking, Insight Development.
Customer Experience Strategy Scorecard
Current Broker Application
Multi-Step Long forms | No Help/Documentation | Inefficient Validations | Misinterpretation of Data | Legacy app and integrations
Current User Journey & Business Process Analysis (VSM + CX Research)
Phase 2 - Re-imagine the Preferred reality (to-be journey)
The as-is journey phase primarily focussed on Concept Ideation, Collaborative Design and Rapid Prototyping to validate concepts and the detailed features with the banking customers. We lead divergent ideation workshops to arrive at a long list of disruptive solution envisioned by the team.
After 4 day long workshops, our preferred reality epic emerged were:
• Interactive guides for customer
• Product picker
• Pre-application & Application checklist
• Loan Application concept,
• Digital loan agreement,
• Settlement checklist,
• Loan tracker
• Loan Hub Platform
NorthStar
"Our customers find it easy to apply and receive a decision on their home loan application within 1 hour"
Out of this the new Loan Application Concept was designed and tested rigorously with brokers. Using the Desirability, Viability and Feasibility framework (DVF) we prioritized the solutions to these epics and used to planned the product roadmap for loan journey. The focus on the delivery effort included defining the MVP with Time/FTE estimates.
The core goal of the phase is to define the preferred reality customer journey and carve out user stories thereby building the epics/roadmap plan for Product Development teams.
Specific enablement activities: Training sessions on Agile, Divergent Thinking, Rapid Prototyping, Codifying a Journey Playbook.
NorthStar
Our customers find it easy to apply and receive a decision on their home loan application within 1 hour
Out of this the new Loan Application Concept was designed and tested rigorously with brokers. Using the Desirability, Viability and Feasibility framework (DVF) we prioritized the solutions to these epics and used to planned the product roadmap for loan journey. The focus on the delivery effort included defining the MVP with Time/FTE estimates.
Proposed Customer/Broker Journey with Story Planning (UCD Approach)
Phase 3 - Build a focus on deliverable of a minimum viable product (MVP)
The Build and Launch phase is where we defined around 18 preferred reality epics (digital initiatives for broker originated home loans) and the quick wins in an effort to deliver upon the client's goal of ease and satisfaction in home loan application and efficiency in provisioning the loan contract within 24 hours time frame.
The following MVP consisted the plan for the first set of features to be taken up for the loan application concept:
- Increase auto approval and approval on data within an hour
- Increase data capture to improve auto approval
- For loans that don’t auto-approve with select refer reasons, CA to assess and provide a decision within an hour
Customer and broker testing phase of first MVP delivered by Product teams herein resulted in:
- Substantial increase in customer satisfaction and advocacy
- Consistent supporting document request and Improved Loan document experience
- 15% uplift in settlements from better conversion rates and more business from brokers.
- More scalable processes which ideally can result in ~40% FTE efficiency gains (CSSO+BDM Support efficiency) and ~15% non-FTE cost savings (changes in valuation ordering policy).
In the overall recommendations, the consulting team identified the saving of around $1.6M for the loan business by reducing the volume of upfront valuations.
The overall set of deliverables on this project were as follows:
01. Customer Journey roadmaps (as-is & to-be)
02. Personas, Verbatims & Insights from initial interviews
03. Value Stream mapping charts
04. Affinity maps for Ideas, Exemplars and Opportunity areas
05. Preferred reality Concepts Cards with Core features and User stories
06. Prioritization framework (DVF - desirability, viability, feasibility) for product roadmap
07. Lean Canvas for key concepts
08. Product Requirement Document (MVP definition and feature details)
09. UX Wireframes and Visual Designs
10. Concept Prototype and Testing Scenario
How to measure the success of Business delivery Epics
Prototype used for Concept Testing for the Journey feature assessment
Here is the sample workflow we tested...
