A strategic framework built around customers and employees

Financial wellbeing affects almost every aspect of our lives, and yet, for many people, it feels like an unattainable goal. Despite advances in consumer products and services in recent years, the average person still struggles to feel in control of their finances.

Our client, a large and well-respected North American Financial Institution (FI), partnered with Bridgeable to create an employee and customer experience framework that would anchor its brand, bring its new corporate purpose to life, and facilitate delivery of its strategy.

Trends in human resources indicate that employee engagement is key to growth and profit in today’s customer-driven financial services market. Our client recognized that, in order to become more competitive, it needed to increase its investment in the employee engagement that would lead to better customer experiences and improved business performance.

Our client wanted to understand how it could promote financial wellbeing among not only its customers, but also its employees, so that both could feel more empowered and in control of their finances.

Taking a service design approach

Bridgeable collaborated with the FI’s employees and customers, as well as competitors’ customers, to build a clear picture of the anticipated transformation; to build alignment around the future vision; and to minimize the execution risk through the development of a clear implementation roadmap.

We conducted a variety of engagements, including in-home interviews, a week of online research, 2 co-creation workshops, and 2 in-person validation workshops. During this process, we connected with 40 customers, 21 non-customers, 39 frontline staff, 14 cross-functional team members, and 9 executives. Using a collaborative design approach, informed by user research and behavioural economics models, we built a strategic framework that materialized what financial wellbeing meant for the client.

Building a framework for financial wellbeing

The strategic framework is an overarching model for how an FI can become a more customer- and employee-centric organization. It is made up of 3 fundamental pillars that help an FI move toward a more holistic model for customer and employee engagement. Design principles provide consistent guidance on how to deliver on each pillar in future tactical implementation projects.

We also developed ideal-state journey maps that illustrate the reimagined future of 4 key customer and employee experiences at the FI, including the new customer and new employee onboarding experiences. These maps are used internally by our client as a tool to drive action and rally the organization around prioritized options for future initiatives to pursue. The maps align and inspire the FI’s employees around the key moments that can improve pain points for customers or make good interactions even better.

Finally, we developed a roadmap of initiatives in collaboration with the FI. This roadmap helped our client prioritize initiatives set against a timeline and included essential considerations like scope, complexity, and implications.

Fulfilling a financial institution’s strategy

Our client came to us with a desire to understand how they could improve its customer and employee experiences. Our service design approach allowed the FI to build organizational consensus around new and innovative ways of thinking and provided them with a strategic framework that facilitates the delivery of its strategy: to improve the financial wellbeing of its employees and customers.