Paving The Way For A Mature Customer Centric Culture At Swedbank

Mall Allpere at UXDX Europe. Video: https://youtu.be/5q7_u8HeVm4

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.

Growing and professionalising the UX team

[00:00:00] Hi, I'm Mall Allpere. I'm a design expert at Swedbank. The bank as we know it is facing great challenges, and bank experiences are now compared not only to FinTechs but also to the likes of Netflix, and the banks that meet this challenge the best will be the winners. At Swedbank, top management realised the threat and the opportunity in this, and also the importance of the user experience in winning this game.

[00:00:32] So, in 2017, they gave the go-ahead to grow the UX group at Swedbank. At that time, the UX group was small and scattered. The team grew from 13 to 27 in one year, to 52 the following year, and now we are at 81 including consultants. Already when we were 27 and I came in as a team manager for part of the team, we started a journey to professionalise the team to step up to this challenge. We grouped the designers in development train groups to mirror the organisation around them, put in place lead UX designers and gave them the mandate to align and to lead, and created a design system group, DesignOps and the foundation research group.

Something was missing

[00:01:22] But even if we in UX design had done our homework to professionalise and grow the team, Swedbank did not get the full effect of UX and customer centricity throughout the bank. There was something missing. The practice of UX and design and customer centricity was not integrated enough in the business and development. It wasn't seen as everybody's job, and the holistic experience was not addressed by all, even though we had some great examples of cooperating. We met hurdles in prioritisation, doing the right things, and in being trusted in a good way of working, doing them right.

[00:01:57] So, Lotta Loven, Head of Digital and IT, our CIO, challenged my manager, Lynn Marie [?], and myself to evangelise customer centricity. Last year, she gave us the opportunity to speak and workshop with hundreds of leaders at Swedbank. We thought carefully about how to get our message through in the best way, and we found four starting points. One, create a sense of urgency but at the same time a promise of good business. Two, build from external research and examples. Three, celebrate a few good examples from in-house to make everybody understand how we ourselves could do it well. Four, straight talk: address all rumours and misconceptions. And this is how we did it.

Stop flying airplanes and start flying people

[00:02:51] We took inspiration from the fact that Lynn and I had the opportunity to meet with William Nicholson [?], who had turned SAS into a flourishing airline company already in the 80s by understanding the business value of putting the customer in the centre. We told the managers that he got everybody in SAS to stop flying airplanes and start flying people. Baggage loaders, pilots, airline technicians, everybody had a role in delivering the best customer experience. What a mind shift.

[00:03:27] With this as an inspirational image, we urged all those managers to be the change leaders for a mature and customer-centric Swedbank, by inspiring them to see how we, together with them, could create better business through experiences, and create experiences by design. We talked to them about design as a process, a way of working to understand the needs of the customer and create solutions for them, but also design as a functional and aesthetic result based on conscious decisions.

A sense of urgency and a promise of good business

[00:03:53] We started by inducing a sense of urgency. One brand's gold standard becomes the price of admission for everyone. Even if earlier our digital experience had been compared to other large banks, now customers judge and compare experiences across industries, and make no difference whether the company delivers a niche service like FinTechs or a service ecosystem like we do. And our experience was not at all that high level yet. There was a gap that we couldn't leave unattended. To close this gap, old banks like ours needed to deliver on customer satisfaction on a much higher level.

[00:04:40] A great challenge, but we put on a positive tone and said that we didn't have to invent how to do it ourselves, because there's a proven recipe that's helped companies with challenges like ours, and that is customer-centric design. And for those companies who've used the recipe well, it has been proven that the business reward is huge. When you evangelise like this, you have to know your audience, and in a bank, money and numbers talk. So, we gave them the well-researched fact that companies with well-integrated customer-centred design outperform the market by no less than 211% in return.

[00:05:21] And we also needed to give them the rational reasons behind it. We told them that this is because of increased revenues, higher loyalty, lower costs. Now we had established that customer centricity is good for business and why, we turned to what Swedbank as a company needed to do to get that great revenue. Again, we used the outside world to reinforce our points, knowing that in our company, advice from outside experts is valued highly.

The McKinsey recipe: customer-centred goals

[00:05:55] So, we took the well-known McKinsey studies. This is the largest research made to date to study design actions that leaders can take to unlock business value. And we presented the clusters of design actions that show the most correlation with improved financial performance, and talked about them as a recipe for success and inspiration when maturing Swedbank's customer centricity. We then adjusted this recipe to the Swedbank needs.

[00:06:21] The first cluster to inspire was that the most successful companies set customer-centred goals and measure on behaviour. They drive the same performance with the same rigour as revenues and costs. They set goals on behaviour by phrasing the goals as descriptions of the desired behaviour: how you want your customers to act, feel or think. For each of the clusters, we gave external examples. We talked about AT&T, which had a business goal to raise their customers' average monthly billing by 10%. They reframed the business goal to how can we help busy families to stay connected.

[00:07:12] We at Swedbank had already started to change our KPIs and goals, putting a clear focus on customer satisfaction. But after our speech, we saw a major shift in mindset at Swedbank. Before this, we had goals like we need to sell more on the front page. Now they turned into goals on behaviour, like we need to maximise customer value on the front page so our customers want to be there. To us in design, this showed a clear shift in focus from business only to business and customer focus.

Customer satisfaction is everybody's job

[00:07:49] The second cluster that we took inspiration from outside the bank and made into ours was making sure that customer satisfaction is everybody's job. Before, it was seen as the UX design job to gather and spread customer understanding. Now, we started to evangelise that everybody in the company, from the CEO to the backend programmer of an internal tool, has an effect on the customer experience. This means that everybody needs to understand the customer and know how to act. The only way to understand the customer is to meet them.

[00:08:26] To make this shift happen, we put in place habits and trainings for everybody in the company. During last year and ongoing, we have had a training open for everybody: a one-day course on customer-centred design for non-designers. A fun, interactive and professional training by our highly skilled research team. We see the effect already in the daily work of all of those who have attended the course.

[00:08:50] In the McKinsey report it says the CEO of one of the world's largest banks spends a day a month with the bank's clients. The day after we presented this, the whole management team of Digital Banking spent half a day at our phone bank, listening in. We also made sure that meeting customers was natural to have in people's development plans. We suggested taking part in interviewing customers, usability tests, phone bank visits. It has helped everybody to understand that the customers are different from us and that we ourselves are not representative: we are not the customer.

[00:09:35] So, on top of it all, we put in place just that as a mantra. We got everybody to stand up in our speeches and say, I am not the customer. I am not the customer. You are not the customer. So, let's go out and meet them.

Prototype, test and learn

[00:09:53] The third ingredient we used as an inspiration is to prototype, test and learn. Our message was that using the right customer-centric methods, fast and iteratively together, is minimising risk, and risk is something any bank wants to minimise. Prototype, test and learn is the Agile development mantra, and it's also the customer-centred design mantra. In Swedbank, we were already well on the way in our Agile and customer-centred journey. But we saw that there was room for improvement in linking these two in our way of working. We had misconceptions about the methods, especially for learning and testing, so we started to address those misconceptions with straight talk.

[00:10:39] The methods were also not spread into all cross-functional development teams. So, to put that into action, we found four areas of improvement that I will talk about now. We spread the design process that Swedbank, as is well known, uses, as do all companies that are serious about experiences. But this process only works when it's fully integrated in the cross-functional teams.

[00:11:12] So, to put that into action, we used the most efficient trick, which is to create understanding of the process. We made a three-hour workshop where hundreds of participants got to try out all the steps of the design process, guided by professional designers. It was a great success, and you could really feel the light bulbs start to light up as they learned interview techniques like five whys and mapping needs into customer journeys before creating ideas.

Demystifying the methods

[00:11:42] We also needed to demystify the methods to get rid of all the misconceptions about what the methods are for, and this is how we tell the story. In user research, we conduct interviews and observations. It asks us why and gives us ideas to build the right things to close that experience gap. Then we talked about how UX design creates designs and prototypes that we test in usability tests. We test how the users manage to complete the tasks. It validates if our solutions work well for real users, and usability testing decreases risk: it's much cheaper to fail here than when it's out in the market.

[00:12:24] And then, last but not least, the quant methods: analysing built services through analytics, A/B testing, et cetera. The quant gives us insights into where and how many customers do a certain thing. We said that these methods complement each other fully and give the most back to business when they are used together. Especially the qualitative methods need to be demystified for those who are not educated in them.

[00:12:55] In Swedbank, and in many other places I have been, there has been this disbelief in the number of customers to interview in qualitative research. In fact, Lotta, our CIO, asked me to explain why that works in front of all of this large audience, and I tell you, it was a bit uncomfortable, but it really did put a stop to the other questions.

[00:13:22] In addition, we have found that when members of the cross-functional team join usability testing, the backlog propels faster forward, because fewer discussions and iterations are needed. With so many teams, we started to do usability testing recurring every second week or every month. The teams together plan what needs a test with a UX designer, so that they can learn about the things they're working on right now, so they can design as correctly as possible in time, before code starts.

Finding the right pragmatic level of research

[00:13:54] A common misunderstanding was that we in UX wanted to make big, bulky research projects out of everything. So, we needed to be clear that it's perfectly fine to be pragmatic when it comes to finding the right level of research. To get that right level, we ask ourselves these four questions before we start to research. Is it an improvement of a function that already exists, or is it a new, unexplored area? Do we know what the customers' needs are? Is it a function that's often used by the customer? And what is the impact for the business if conversion is low?

[00:14:35] This explanation helped a lot in clearing out that misunderstanding. But even better is to show the right pragmatic level in action. When moving the insurances from the old internet bank to the new design, because there was already a planned test, the team managed in just two weeks to go full circle from starting requirements until we had a concept based on customer insight. Quick and clean. In fact, this gave us credibility and helped us to create room for much larger research.

Supporting the holistic experience

[00:15:04] The last message we needed to spread was that successful companies support the holistic experience. They understand that customers don't talk about our company's silos; they don't care. They understand that they need to treat every single delivery as a part of a whole, to understand, map and act on the customer's whole needs, and successful companies use service design methods such as customer journey mapping to do this.

[00:15:40] We at Swedbank had been working with customer journey maps for several years, and it is by far the most impactful tool to centre any team or organisation around doing the right thing for the customer. We just needed to convince the audience to use the customer journey map even more, not only for insight but as a tool for prioritisation and knowing what to do. To reinforce our point even more, we used Airbnb as an example. By using the customer journey map, they went from seeing the website and the app as the actual product to seeing the whole trip, from the dream to getting home again, as the product, and this shift in the company led to exponential growth.

[00:16:31] The lending area at Swedbank was already much more design mature than the others. So, we used the lending process as a hero project, creating a beautiful, easy-to-read map so that other development trains would understand better, but also understand that the customer journey spans different parts of the organisation and even begins outside our channels. Something that has helped turn everybody to design for the holistic experience.

What it resulted in

[00:17:05] So, this was some of what we at Swedbank did to become more mature, with customer centricity integrated not only in design but also in product management and development. We got our message through by consistently sticking to these four starting points throughout our storytelling. Create a sense of urgency, but at the same time a promise of good business. Build from external research and examples. Celebrate a few good examples from in-house to make everybody understand how we could do it well. Straight talk: address all rumours and misconceptions.

[00:17:46] All of this resulted in not only UX, but everyone, being on board with the fact that when doing more customer-centred design actions, we become more efficient by doing the right things and doing them right, and we increase customer satisfaction when we make it everybody's job to create the holistic experience. And we are now on a good path to start flying our own customers, which will help us to ensure that this bank will win in the new customer landscape. Thank you.