Situation

A Nordic bank was struggling with an obsolete mortgage process. The extensive manual handling meant that the process heavily consumed resources, and the customer experience was not meeting the expectations of a modern online and mobile bank. As an example only 10% of customers starting the online application for mortgage commitment went through to completion. The competitors where evidently investing to improve their online presence in the area. No one really knew how an ideal digital mortgage process needed to look like to meet or surpass the customers expectations. The first step on the digitization road was to adopt an outside-in perspective and understand the customer journey, defined as ‘buying a home’ rather than only the internal mortgage processing. A key success factor was to feel empathy with challenges that customer faced along this customer journey, but also to understand the differences among customers and what was important for them.

Solution

To reinvent the customer journey a digitization project was launched that applied Service Design practices from day one:

• A desirable vision was formed from a blank page rather than revisiting the current solution. Ideas where conceived with a radical focus on the customers challenges and visualized to align a common view: “if we would start a new bank, how would it look like”

• The next step was to carve out a smaller part of the larger vision which could be designed, developed and launched on stand-alone basis to quickly test key features, i.e. a Minimum Viable Product (MVP)

• The MVP was designed using prototypes as basis of collecting customer input and get a deeper understanding of the ideal process flow

• Using agile development practices the MVP was built, tested and launched by a cross-functional and co-located project team ensuring both speed and quality

• Customer feedback from launched solution was fed back to refine the solution and steer the development prioritization

Result

1. A new digital solution for mortgage processing launched, increasing the conversion rate by 200%

2. From high performing individuals to a high performing team with weeks between releases instead of months

3.  Data analytics integrated into the solution to capture actual customer behavior to steer future development