Designing resilience tools to support UK credit customers
Mark and the team worked skilfully with our senior stakeholders to identify some of the important customer experience tensions and challenges we face in re-platforming. The research showed how to build customer experience and value by offering innovative services to a new, wider audience, and how to understand the behaviours and sentiment of our loyal, legacy customers so that they too can benefit from the evolution of our proposition.
The work delivered an array of clear and well-designed materials with value across customer personas. These strategically useful insights will continue to guide our customer experience decision-making."
Chris Grant, Head of User Experience, NBrown
WINTER '20
The UK retail credit market is being disrupted by challengers who group under the title Buy Now Pay Later (I’ve written a few words on this group here). This disruption is double-edged. On the upside BNPL have delivered a challenge to incumbents to simplify borrowers sales journeys, but on the down they’ve lent hundreds of millions of pounds of unregulated credit, that is starting to go wrong for many borrowers.
The Challenge
Our retailer client wanted to know how they could better serve their credit customers given the changing market and their business ambitions. They have a fantastic track record in responsibly serving the financially underserved in a market of thin credit files and poor credit records. They were keen to understand how to shape a credit proposition to win a new type of customer whilst still maintaining their commitment to their less-moneyed, potentially more vulnerable base.
Our Approach
I formed a UX research and design team to answer this question. We shaped a Discovery project to enable us understand the business, the UK credit market and our clients current and future customer needs. Our overall objective being to find opportunities to build better, attractive, more supportive online journeys for all customers.
Firstly we took the pulse of the business and the market through an audit of competitor landscape, the state of play and the innovation horizon. We spent time with the leadership team and senior stakeholders so that we could be sure we understood what they were tying to do and for whom so that we would work with the right customers - important for a business with ambition and planning transformation.
Regulations provide just another set of design constraints that designers must understand (Ive written a few words on this here) and getting across the material led us to realise that the BNPL disruptors were about to be hit with a very big FCA stick (this has happened..).
We worked remotely throughout and were gratified by the strong sense of ‘presence’ and connection that we achieved in an hour with a customer or a stakeholder over a video-link. We designed our time with customers so that we could open up discussion, thinking and reflection through ZOOM mediated conversations, before consolidating this with customers using MIROs online white-boards.
Our Findings
We discovered how important data is in the creation and delivery of a frictionless (and appropriate) journey for customers, and that different customers need different types of journey and recommended how to use data effectively to open up opportunity and reduce friction responsibly. Financial sales journeys should not be totally frictionless, people need to be encouraged to understand what they are signing upto.
Key to this was the recognition that financial resilience, personal experiences with credit, the individuals tendency to over-spend or self-gratify, their engagement with personal finance and their thinking styles all emerged as key factors in understanding peoples credit experiences.
From this we built a credit experience model that explains why some people get into trouble, why some people don’t and how to help everyone stay in control.
Importantly, we found that disposable income isn’t the most important determinant of whether an individual is able to stay on top of their spending - but the more income there is the more resilient they are likely to be and therefore more able to weather a financial shock.
We found that people's circumstances mean they move around the categories of risk and experience in the model - and that there are very few ‘bad actors’ as most people want to stay in control and be good customers - however character and circumstances sometimes conspire to make this very difficult.
Most importantly we found that people can learn to become better personal money managers if they can change the way they think about their finances and this is the key to providing support to everyone.
Our Recommendations
We used our findings to define a set of actionable interventions, controls and design innovations that would deliver enhanced credit journeys to all customers - but especially those who may need support. This is important as we enter a period of economic uncertainty in the aftermath of the pandemic. One in which many more customers may become financially more vulnerable.
We also identified some dark patterns which gave the wrong kind of nudge to customers struggling to stay in control, these patterns reflect common commercial practice amongst some credit providers - our work showed why this should change.
