Creating Journey Maps For A 200 Year Old Bank

Anthea Blanas at UXDX APAC. Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=75fNZcjhoi8

Readable transcript: edited from the recording's captions for readability (fillers and false starts removed, punctuation and section headings added). Wording is the speaker's own. Timestamps are positions in the video. Names marked [?] could not be verified against the audio.

Introduction and Michelle's story

[00:00:01] It's really nice to be here today. Before I begin, I would like to start by acknowledging the traditional custodians of the land on which we gather today and paying my respects to their elders past and present. I extend that respect to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples here today. My name is Anthea Blanas, and I'm a strategic design lead at Westpac. It's really nice to be here and have the opportunity to speak and share my experience about a topic that I'm really passionate about. My role at Westpac, amongst other things, has me focusing primarily on developing ethnographic research and contextual design investigations to understand people's behaviors and pain points around financial services. Those insights help guide the conceptual development of products and services with other specialists that we have across the organization.

[00:00:52] Today I'm going to speak about why research is critical in driving organizational change, the opportunity that we have to help people work together towards aligned purpose and outcomes, and how to evolve with people's expectations. Let me start by telling you a story. This is a story of one of the approximately 14 million customers that Westpac has. It's about Michelle, and she's 23 years old. She got in trouble with credit early on in her life. She was always feeling a little bit terrible with money, and that sentiment came from how she saw her mother handling finances. She got a car loan when she was very young, with the assistance of her mother, of course, and then got another loan to pay for some medical expenses.

[00:01:50] Over time she saw all of those expenses bubbling up, and she was feeling the pressure of high interest rates, and thought that it would be a great idea to consolidate those two loans into one, to give herself a pay rise. But things didn't really work out for her that way, when she was declined for the loan. What had happened was that she had recently applied online for five credit cards, just to see what would happen. At that point Michelle had no understanding of what credit scores were, and she didn't realize what making a bunch of applications would do to her. It wasn't until she asked for help in a branch that she learned what had happened, and then tried to set about a way to remediate her score, so that she could try again to consolidate her loans at a later date. She felt that she had to learn a lot in a short space of time, and she learned it the hard way. Those were her words.

[00:02:53] In that interview, Michelle was almost bursting into tears. Each time we speak to our customers, each of them has their own story, their own unique needs, and the way that they think about finances is always connected with something that's happening in their life. As a designer privileged to this information, it fundamentally changed me. I realized at that point in time that how I was thinking about finances was very transactional. And the reality is that even though banking is transactional, finances are emotional, and they evolve over time, just like people do.

[00:03:44] As time passed, the more we listened to the stories of people, what we found was that for most of them, money is a tool. It enables you to do the things that you want to do, protect yourself, and build yourself and your family a better life. So the challenge then for my team was: how do we share this understanding more broadly within the organization to enable the change that we want to see?

A 200-year-old bank moving to end-to-end journeys

[00:04:08] That was not an easy task at all. In an organization this size, we're talking about a company that is 200 years old. It has complex relationships, influencers, goals. In most cases, businesses as a whole are simply not wired naturally to think about the journeys that customers actually take. They're wired for transactions. They're not wired for journeys, and they're certainly not wired for the emotions that people have. They have multiple departments and people, and every single one of these people intends to create a positive customer interaction: marketers, digital teams, frontline employees, service employees. They directly or indirectly impact the customer experience. But because of the traditional ways of working and how targets are set, it's hard to change the culture and the structure to respond to those customer needs.

[00:05:08] Westpac has realized that financial services are no longer compelling enough on their own, and that our experiences need to be anchored in customer needs. That's why the business is currently undergoing a service revolution transformation, transitioning to an end-to-end customer journey approach. This requires a lot of changes to address the complex ecosystem that we're operating in. The three core changes are, first, a change in approach: from finding the right customers to suit our products, to creating experiences that respond to our customers' needs. Second, a change in culture: from siloed and misaligned objectives to people, processes and technology that are anchored to a common understanding of customer needs. And third, a change in structure: going from a hierarchical and functional structure to cross-functional, empowered journey teams that span all the products, channels and touchpoints.

[00:06:16] Phase zero, which is what I'm calling it, of that transformation started some years ago. It was the first step towards this approach, and it was implemented on a smaller scale with cross-collaborative teams of specialists. Essentially, we started by orienting around journeys. Journeys are not a new concept. They've been around for quite a while and have been used in very different ways by different practitioners around the globe, and a quick search on Google can show you the different variations that exist.

[00:06:53] But the problem was that journeys were so flexible in terms of content, the elements and what they were trying to achieve, that we didn't know how to use them in the beginning, or what would be most beneficial for the business. So we started by using these maps within the organization as a tool for collaboration, and to see them evolve over time, not to have them as a deliverable that would just sit there once a project ends. You can see a little bit in the background; this is before COVID, all of the activities that the team undertook in this phase zero approach.

Customer journeys and service journeys

[00:07:40] The first step we took to solve that problem was to differentiate and define the different types of journeys. We have customer journeys and service journeys. I'm not going to go into too much detail, but essentially customer journeys are a visual framework that helps us see through the eyes of our customers and gain a deeper understanding of how people use their finances: their behaviors, their needs and wants from financial services, agnostic to any product or service. They can include many things, like what's happening before, during and after the experience of a product or service, and they can be long, stretching across touchpoints, or short.

[00:08:19] Versus that, we have service journeys, which are again a visual framework, which helps us deconstruct and make sense of how customers go through a specific path, of how current products and services work for them. It separates what's happening on the front end, in front of the customer, from where all of the support processes live that produce that front stage, and those things are usually invisible to the customer. The backstage is the assets, the organization and everything that's happening behind the scenes.

[00:08:55] To give you a more specific example, we have the customer journey of buying a home, versus a service journey, which is applying for a home loan. To give a little more context, according to a recent report from Domain, it takes an average of six years for first home buyer couples to save a deposit for an entry-level house in Sydney. If you're by yourself, it goes up to 13 years, which is a lot of time just to get a foot in the market. The considerations at the level of that customer journey are: how do I save for that deposit? Where do I want to live? Will this be a stepping stone for me, or is this my forever home? What type of home do I need now, and five years in the future? You have all of that decision-making process from a customer perspective.

[00:09:49] Versus if you look at applying for a home loan, that's after you've made the decision about what you want to do, and you're thinking about questions like: what loan can I afford? What are the repayments? Is there a way to pay it faster? What documents do I need to submit? What if something changes and I can't afford those repayments? So, very simply, this is the difference between those two things, and we needed to separate those within the business to have a common language.

Journeys within journeys

[00:10:22] Journeys are a flexible concept. They can be relatively short and simple, like making a payment. They can be long and complex, like buying a home. Or they can span the entire arc of a relationship over potentially many years, like a customer life cycle. I'll pause here for a moment to really emphasize the importance of that life cycle for us, a business that has been operating for over 200 years. We have so many customers that have been with us for a very long time: from when they got their first job, their first car, their first home, had a family, and now they're close to retirement. Some families have been with the bank for generations, and others have been selecting the bank only for a specific service.

[00:11:10] The interviews that we do are with people at various stages of their life, and the more we do that, the more we understand what really matters. Then we take all of those learnings and reflect on what we can do better to set our customers up for success. It's very complex, because life is complex, but we need to embrace that complexity, because the decisions that we make affect the lives of other people and possibly entire communities.

[00:11:40] I really want to give you an analogy, because I love this video about the geospatial world. It provides a great analogy of how to move within that flexibility of journeys, so I'm just going to play it for a moment.

[00:12:26] Great, I hope you enjoyed that. In an effort to grasp that complexity, what I needed to learn to do, so that I could help others do it within the organization, is to move fluidly between the layers of abstraction and understand how they are connected. So these journeys within journeys, we think of them as a map that you can choose to zoom in and out of, depending on what your focus is. Again, this is very high level; there's a lot more detail that goes into this map.

[00:12:59] The reason we needed to further clarify the sub-journeys was that in an organization of this size, there are so many projects happening at the same time, and they are all in some way or another interlinked. We needed to understand the impact of changes on multiple levels, so that we could understand how one piece of work is influencing the whole system, or if one piece of work is influencing another piece of work and maybe we need to bridge those two things together.

[00:13:27] To explain this diagram a little further, moving from the top: we have people going about their everyday lives, your day-to-day, everything that you're doing. At some point something happens in your life that causes you to reevaluate where you are. This example is getting married. You reevaluate your finances; you need to do budgeting. After that, it becomes your new reality, so you go back to your day-to-day life with that new journey inherited into it. Then you might have another goal down the track, which is owning a home, which we talked about earlier. But all of these customer journeys, which are at the top of the slide, are underpinned by service journeys at the bottom, and this is what helps people move through their life. It could be only one service or multiple services, depending on what their goals are.

Behavioral cohorts and layers of detail

[00:14:33] Drilling down a little further, another consideration in how we've used these maps when designing services, and this might sound obvious, but sometimes the obvious can be missed, is that people going through the same customer journey go about it financially in very different ways. That's why we consider behavioral cohorts in the work that we do, because we know that the same services can be used in different ways by different people.

[00:15:04] In this example, Margaret changed her everyday behavior to save money and go on a holiday, got a credit card just as a backup in case of an emergency, and also purchased travel insurance, because she wants to have that safety. Versus Emma, who is a little more spontaneous. She lives for the day. She purchased the tickets, she went on a holiday, she used her credit card, splurged on the trip and had a fantastic time. Then she came back to a huge bill and didn't know what to do with it, and needed to decide how to pay it back over time. Both of these examples are just illustrative, but they show you how people can use the same products in different ways and have different outcomes. All of that is incredibly complex, but we need to understand it so that we can understand the impacts of how we design our products and services.

[00:16:03] When you see things through that lens, it really forces you to stop and think about what problems you're solving, for whom, and how much of an impact these changes are going to make. By having these linkages, we can see how the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Depending on what part of the journey you're working on, you can reveal different layers of detail. That goes from user interface design questions, such as: is the text a readable size for different age groups? We have so many people across all life stages that we need to be focusing on that. In a UX design sense: will people be easily able to make repayments using this app? In a service design sense: what is the loan application process that employees facilitate for a customer? And at the far end, it's looking at the complex system of the person who needs to make a decision: am I really making the best financial decision for me and my family?

[00:17:02] If we can align ourselves to understand what customers are looking to get out of the services, we can trickle down and see how that applies to the work that we're doing in the moment. However, I just want to reinforce that the richness of the insights that come through the research is what fuels great design artifacts that change the thinking, the culture and the results in a company, delivering services that people need. If you don't have yourself grounded in research, these documents can be ineffective; they can be dangerous.

Needs stay the same, expectations change

[00:17:55] This takes me to my next point. From all of the research that we've done, what we realized is that people's needs don't change over time. What does change is their expectations of how we service those needs. To give you an example, a customer need is accessing my money. That specific need has existed for a very long time. Sixty years ago, people could only access their money if they physically went into a branch and requested it from a teller, and access was limited to weekday working hours only.

[00:18:33] In the seventies, the first computerized ATM was introduced, which could identify the customer using the card's magnetic strip and a PIN number. Initially the machines only operated from 7:00 AM to 11:00 PM. Then the number of ATMs exploded during the 1980s and 1990s, as the banks moved to electronic banking. By 2017, ATM numbers were declining, because tap-and-go cards were increasingly replacing cash, even for small transactions. And over the last decade, digital wallets have grown from a niche payment option to a global phenomenon. So the fundamental need of accessing money when you need to pay for things has not changed. What has changed is our expectations, our behaviors and how we fulfill that need.

[00:19:26] The example above illustrates how companies have focused on upgrading customer touchpoints. These are the individual transactions through which customers interact with the business over time to meet a specific need. Doing that for many years led to an explosion of customer interaction points across new channels, devices and applications. But that created a siloed focus on individual touchpoints, and that missed the bigger picture.

[00:20:06] Because what happened is, when we interviewed people who were not happy with our service, most of them were not too fussed about an issue with a specific touchpoint, like a payment not going through or a delay in receiving approval for a loan. What was making people leave was something that we were not measuring at the time: the customer's cumulative experience across multiple channels, multiple interactions and over time. And that was the key to building stronger and deeper relationships.

Relationships over time

[00:20:44] Looking at that in a little more detail, we looked at a study done in 2015 on transformational relationship events: how some of these events contribute to incremental relationship development, as predicted by life cycle theories, whereas others spark turning points, with dramatic impacts on the relationship. Such events can disconfirm relationship expectations positively or negatively, or they can change the trajectory of the relationship itself. You can see in the diagram that the same positive event, over time, might go from a very positive one to something that you've gotten used to and that doesn't matter anymore. Versus a negative event that happened early on in the relationship: if it happens again over time, it might be something that changes the relationship completely.

[00:21:50] That dimension of time, and how it unfolds to form relationships, is something new that we added as a consideration in our work, as typical journey frameworks don't involve it. And it shouldn't be confused with traditional retention or cross-selling methods. Being part of an organization with this history, the focus at the moment is to help extremely [?] succeed, and the only way that we can succeed is by building stronger relationships. So it all comes down to people helping people in moments that matter.

Putting it all together

[00:22:29] So how do we put this all together? First, we need to focus on stories. We need to focus on listening to people, understanding people of different ages, different cultures, different financial and relationship situations. All of that insight made me realize how important it is to do exactly that: understand how people make, or are reluctant to make, financial decisions, and why it's important to them. By doing that, we can define opportunity areas, we can craft experience principles, we can experiment with ideas. These stories build empathy and are the key source for moving to solving real problems for people.

[00:23:09] The second point is layering journeys to connect everyday decisions with strategically aligned outcomes. You can zoom in and zoom out depending on the level of detail that you're working on. This is where we need to include the customer outcomes and emotions, the jobs to be done framework, the services that we're creating, capability mapping from a tech perspective, the systems and processes that are happening in the business, and any metrics that we want to put in place to measure those outcomes.

[00:23:44] And the last piece is to factor in how you can build relationships over time. It's really important to understand that there are life events that change the course of how people view their finances. They're moments that matter in people's lives, and we need to be able to identify those and adapt to unforeseen circumstances. I know that we've talked about really great, positive scenarios today, like owning a home and getting married, but there are unforeseen circumstances, like losing a job in a pandemic, which people never thought would happen. How do we adapt as a business to solve for those needs in a manner that shows genuine care for people?

[00:24:29] And also looking at influential relationships. At the beginning of your life you're by yourself, and you possibly make decisions by yourself. But over time you have other people in your life with whom you join finances, and how you've managed your money might not be the same as how other people manage their money. Those are considerations that change the outlook of your financial situation.

[00:24:57] The work that I've been doing in the bank did not happen overnight, and it is a collective effort across multiple teams. This work really aims to shift the culture and mindsets, because we need to activate people to see the change become a reality. It's an ongoing, continuous challenge, and it requires vision, persistence and tenacity. Any methods or deliverables are short-lived without people championing them and shepherding key influencers within the organization. So I'll leave you with a question: what could you do today to adopt this approach within your organization? Thank you.