Secret to Customer-Centered Experiences? Live Your Mission at All Your Touchpoints

I interviewed Gavin Cooper, head of design at Vanguard, for his insight and experience into how a financial services organization creates customer experience that supports customer comfort levels.

Photo by Anthony Tran on Unsplash

Last week I didn’t publish an issue. I spent last week driving and moving my son into his dorm for 2 weeks of quarantine and, then we hope, his first semester of university. The car was empty on the drive home.  Yes, I’m worried, but I know his university, especially his major department, has spent months working out new protocols to teach and learn in-person.  So, a calculated risk.

As you might suspect, my son loves cooking, creating new dishes. I’m pretty sure he was the only child in his kindergarten class who knew the word “amuse bouche.” And, no, I didn’t teach it to him. Over the years, he’s come up with amazing dinners using the same items I cook every day with. Unlike my son, though I cook every day - I have to. I love cooking but it’s not my sole focus. Like other parents, I fit cooking in between my other obligations: work, home management (ie cleaning bathrooms, laundering clothes, washing dishes), and driving my other child to her activities.

As much I am passionate about, write and talk about customer experience, I wanted to find out how financial services organizations are “doing customer experience.” To do that, I interviewed my friend Gavin Cooper.

Gavin is the head of design at Vanguard. His job is to oversee the customer experience design at Vanguard. I wanted to get his insight and experience into how a financial services organization approaches customer experience today, during a pandemic of course, and looking forward.

I sought out Gavin because he is a designer, not a finance or banker by profession. He’s worked in digital and print. I also sought out Gavin because he works for an investment services firm, not a bank. I certainly don’t want you to think I’m covering only retail banking! His expertise & thoughts on customer experience & digital will interest all of you – whether you work for a bank, investment firm, or a software vendor.

Full disclosure: I know Gavin because he is a former neighbor of mine. And, I was a Vanguard client for over 20 years.

Also: I condensed and edited the interview.

The first thing I asked Gavin about was his strategic priorities:

GC: Vanguard design focuses on the optimizing the customer’s digital path. Vanguard’s 2 priorities of this focus are onboarding and digital engagement with Vanguard.

SC: How do you define customer experience?

GC: Customer experience is “living your mission in all of your touchpoints.” If a client interacts with you, that’s an experience of and a promise of the brand and reputation.

SC: Which touchpoints are a priority for Vanguard and the design teams?

GC: We are going to meet you (the customer) where you are and give you as many options for interacting as possible.

All design is designed to minimize investor effort. Any decision or choice or input the customer has to make is supported – automated where they can. Customer experience design also manages every customer comfort level.

SC: Design priorities and strategy are all very well and good, but how does Vanguard measure client satisfaction with their experiences with the company?

GC: We measure client satisfaction and emotions triggered during a customer interaction. We specifically research emotional triggers. Managing investments are a series of continuous event-driven interactions. We talk weekly with customers via surveys and field research. Field research gives the ability to watch customers body language. The design team synthesizes emotional triggers research to guide them in design that supports clients. For example, how do we use design to solve for client anxiety?

The solution ties directly to Vanguard’s mission to help their clients make better investment decisions. How then to solve client anxiety when performing a task like opening an IRA account? Build client confidence through the process and support the customer with the availability of someone to talk to.  The design team is cognizant that they can’t force behavior changes; they can only nudge. Even so, the design team is very selective about nudging to change customer behavior.

SC: How do you evaluate customer experience design?

GC: Depends on the kind of experience and the type of customer – new or existing. We  incorporate feedback loops are incorporated into all flows and products to find out:

• Did the customer completed a task online?

• Did they shift channels?

• How many interactions did it take to complete the task or process?

We survey all customers about their experience and combine these metrics. Feedback can be tricky because some customers love the company and don’t complain about a small part of their experience.

SC: A common feature of financial services organizations is silos – every line-of- business and IT. I asked Gavin how the design team coped with silos.

GC: We’ve learned a lot of lessons about managing silos.

Vanguard, not just the design team, wanted to be fast to market and to excel at customer experience. Even with designers in-house, the organization, with intact silos, experienced a lot of communication breakdowns. It was hard to deliver the results the organization sought and impossible to focus on a continuous relationship with customers. Traditional silo organization meant that the company moved too slowly.

To be fast to market and responsive to client needs, Vanguard created product teams – that is not design teams. Product teams are comprised of IT, business, design, finance, and compliance people could not be silos operating in parallel. Everyone who has a stake at the table is in the group. Everyone also comes to the team with the same understanding of the business operates, how Vanguard makes money and what the mission is.

SC: Don’t many people already have low expectations of financial institutions?

GC: Yes, in many ways people have low expectations of financial institutions, but I believe this will change. Most consumers are using apps such as AirBnB and that experience is the norm. However, most investment activities are still done on the desktop versus the mobile device. So, customers don’t necessarily have the same expectation that their financial institutions will work like apps and they expect financial services to be hard to use.

SC: What are the challenges of customer experience design in a regulated environment?

GC: Designing customer experiences in a regulated business context is really challenging. But it is critical and necessary. Regulation and compliance has a negative context in design because designers are trying to push for a good customer experience and compliance rules push against that goal. We used to be a big divide between designers and the compliance team. Designers now view regulations and compliance differently. Compliance is viewed as a good thing because it protects clients and helps the organization.

SC: How did this happen?

GC: Every week, we review design with legal and compliance team members. Legal and compliance are involved early in projects to avoid the rabbit hole problem. Designers understand early on what the guardrails are for the problems they are trying to solve and who the stakeholders are.

The product team approach ensures that designers understand that compliance folks and regulations also support the business.

SC: What about the future of customer experience and processes?

GC: Vanguard doesn’t have physical branches but even so, we don’t require clients or prospective clients to follow one rigid process flow to make a decision or complete an action. While Vanguard provides paper forms (in a variety of ways), I believe that all forms will have a digital option.

SC: Electronic signatures are increasingly common in other areas of life — what is the future of paper and handwritten signature requirements for many investment tasks?

GC: Implementing electronic signatures is challenging because of requirements for customer authentication and fraud. In addition, handwritten signatures provide additional comfort for clients.  Despite this comfort, I predict that customers’ appetite for paper will continue to decrease. COVID19, will probably push more digital. I also expect new ideas to emerge from this pandemic about how to digitalize more of the customer experience.

SC: Who are your design competitors?

GC: Your competition is the last app your customer used – or their favorite app. This reality needs to be factored into the customer experience. For example, AirBnB is good on transparency. Simple, Betterment, WealthFront are examples of more modern design experiences. But these organizations are not as complex as Vanguard.

A few takeaways from my interview:

• Can your digital banking solution adapt to your bank customers’ missions? Or does it require the bank’s mission to adapt to your solution?

• A single customer experience or flow can be digital but it’s not design-centered customer experience. Customer experience design meets customers where they are. It should not force customers to do things that make them anxious.

• Regulations require some paper -- but prepare for that requirement to change. You can’t depend on regulations to stagnate — especially with the pressure that a pandemic can put on both the business and regulatory environments.

• Design-centered customer experience means that all parts of the organization must work together, with the same understanding of the mission and the business model(s).

• Want to change the way your organization’s work culture? Tie everything back to the mission. Make sure everyone knows what everyone else does and why they do it. In Vanguard’s case, designers changed their view of compliance because they understood the role of compliance and see how it ties back to the mission – just as the design job does.

• Expect the customer experience during the pandemic to drive open new areas for digitizing financial services tasks.

  • Identify ways consumer behavior is changing during the pandemic generally - not just in financial services.

  • Evaluate your solution’s ability to respond quickly to those new demands and requirements.

Who publishes this newsletter?

I’m a former Gartner analyst. I’ve worked in and covered the banking industry for 27 years. I still think & write about digital banking — but also indulge my other interests, women in tech, startups - especially those in the US Midwest & South Eastern Europe), leadership & change, and AgTech.

I write this newsletter for people who are trying to differentiate their banking software in an increasingly competitive market. That could be people who work at software companies currently developing banking software or people at vendors that want to move vertically into the banking market.  I think this focus will interest bankers and investors as well.

I publish weekly. For now, this newsletter is free. 

You can find & talk to me on twitter and LinkedIn — I look forward to our conversation.

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All material copyright Stessa Cohen 2020