Lloyds Banking Group: Credit card servicing
I have a soft spot for Lloyds Banking Group (LBG) as it was here I discovered there was job that would inform the ‘why’ behind the ‘what’ of design.
LBG also gave me the opportunity to transfer into UX design and to learn my skills from a team of some 70 or so brilliant designers, many of whom I’m still in touch with today.
I was placed with the Credit Card Servicing team and embarked upon two major projects that I will outline below.
Context
The Credit Card Servicing team was focused on updating how customers interacted with their credit cards. This was the number one source of complaints within the bank.
Team setup
I was placed in a cross-functional team that included: Scrum lead, Product owner, Business Analyst, Business Experience analyst, Technical Architect and Dev. We worked in an agile fashion following Scrum methodology.
Tools used
Axure, Viso
Key challenges
Credit Card billing was complex
Working with legacy technology
Ways of working varied as LBG were trying to find their ideal model
Getting to grips with and creating interactive prototypes using Axure
Simplifying payments
Our original brief was to redesign the credit card payments hub. This was a number one source of customer complaints and received the lowest NPS scores.
Discovery
The team set about investigating what the actual problems were with this journey that we needed to fix. They did this in a variety of ways including:
Customer testing
Analysis of complaints
Webtrends
Customer feedback
Competitor analysis
FCA direction dissuading long-term debt
Definition
The following problems were identified and defined:
Very wordy, text heavy pages with no clear action points for the customer
Lack of understanding around the term ‘Direct Debits’ (DD)
Different journeys for customers setting up a DD, depending on whether they were doing so from a single or joint account.
The same issue also applied if they wished to amend or cancel their DD
Huge complexity around: billing period, statement date and payment date
Results within three months of design release:
an increase of more than 200% in DD setups
Credit card complaints fell to their lowest ever levels
The process of setting up a CC was reduced from 20mins to around 3mins!
Personalised messaging
“Real time feedback on what I owe my credit card, thus preventing non-payment fines due to misunderstanding.”
Challenge
A common scenario was that a customer would receive their credit card bill and often leave their payment until perhaps a day or two before their bill was due.
Whilst making their payments online many would opt to set up a Direct Debit (DD). After setting this up they would then think no more about their CC bill as they had set up a DD and that monthly payments would then be taken care of.
Unfortunately it could take up to six weeks for a DD to take effect, which resulted in the customer being hit with a late payment charge as they hadn’t paid that month’s bill.
Complex credit card payment system
Billing cycle
Payment statement
Payment due date
Each message created had to take on board each of the above cycles and decide where in that cycle the customer found themselves. The outcome of this calculation would have a direct effect on the message and advice they were then given.
Limiting the messages
Although we were trying to create more personalised messaging for our customers, the challenge was limiting these messages to a manageable amount that could be reused on multiple journeys.
clear consistent information to the customer
reduced costs for the business
less complex for other teams further down the line looking to update the messages for any reason
Success, partial success and failure messages
Working with the copy writer I had to outline each different scenario that had been identified and ensure the copy created would fit every circumstance along with the dynamic information fed back.
Results
Real time feedback on customers account
Five new messages covering all outcomes
Warnings given if extra payments were needed before DD kicked in
Created messaging for: success, partial success and failure pages
New iconography was introduced
Lessons learnt
Original page
This was to be a short project that would fit into the key work we’d done on 'simplifying payments’. How wrong this assumption proved to be!
Collaborating with a non-digital team who did not understand our process or documentation
When we sent documentation to be reviewed by the stakeholder team they would often feedback on the wrong elements. As such we had to create new ways of documenting our designs to ensure we received the correct feedback.
Content strategy
We had to ensure that every message we produced was relevant to that customer at that point in the journey as well as ensure that we kept the number of messages produced limited. Although we were aiming to personalise messaging - the technology still wasn’t overly proficient so we had to literally design within the constraints of the technology to hand.
Updated page
Proof of concept: Credit Card Offers
Attracting new customers is far more expensive than retaining them.
Our team was approached by the Credit Card Consumer team to work on a concept that would encourage our customers to stay with LBG rather than more to a more attractive offer with another lender.
Workshop
As with any new design project we were going to hold a workshop. As a team we decamped to Cardiff (where the consumer team were based) and held a 3-day ‘discovery and definition’ workshop.
This proved to be fantastically useful for many reasons including:
We got to know each other better and understand what was important to the team
The whole team was able to drop into the workshop at some point meaning we were able to list out and identify all the wants / needs / problems / opportunities
We were able to ‘fail fast’ with suggestions as we had the key people in the room
Design
Upon returning to London we were all able to rapidly progress with our tasks.
Sketches became wireframes; and wireframes became prototypes.
We held remote walkthroughs with key stakeholders and when everyone was in agreement on the suggested designs we went into usability testing.
Usability testing
The time arrived to test the concept and design on LBG customers within customer labs. Along with others from the team I ‘observed’ the testing making notes on each session, identifying common themes in the feedback.
As always there were results that proved to be surprising - along with those that were less so.
Lessons learnt
The difference between the ‘wants’ of a stakeholder workshop and the reality of technical availability and cost
Outlook of stakeholders was more ‘territorial’ than holistic
The importance of ‘Entry points’
Less clicks isn’t always best
