How might we enable HDFC Bank to transform their CX for their 17 million credit card customers, in order to reduce customer’s reliance on call centres and increase customer-to-bank engagement?

Led the design and delivery of a unified credit card management ecosystem for HDFC Bank. The CX transformation strategy and digital touch point designs were aimed at boosting adoption and usage of self-service journeys, and increasing the customer’s engagement with the bank and their credit card.

Project Overview

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The Business Challenge

The client is the worlds 4th largest bank by market cap and India’s largest private bank. They faced escalating customer service requests for their credit card product and card management services. This led to an increase in operational overheads and reduction in customer satisfaction across channels.

The Impact

The end-to-end implementation of our solutions resulted in 28% drop in overall customer support queries, and triggered higher service usage and improved customer satisfaction.

The Team

Group Lead

Senior Design Consultant - me

Design Consultant

The Process

Project Timeline: 7 Weeks

My Role

Research, Workshop Design & Facilitation, Service Design, Product Strategy, UX Design, Prototyping (low to high fidelity, Stakeholder & Project Management

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Research

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Stakeholder Interviews

I conducted interviews with eight key stakeholders across verticals, focussing on understanding the bank’s challenges on delivering impactful customer experiences, their vision and goals for the credit cards product & services.

02

Ecosystem Mapping

Workshops served as platforms for deep diving into the bank’s existing touch points, propositions, and processes related to Credit Cards, shedding light on the limited cross-channel interactions and potential white spaces.

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Journey & Service Mapping

Leveraging findings from recent ethnographic studies and quantitative customer support data, we ran workshops with key stakeholders to map as-is customer journeys which helped identify potential areas for intervention.Mapping those to the back-end processes, helped identify system gaps leading to disjointed CX.

Key Problems

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The research phase enabled us to isolate three principal barriers to self-service and higher engagement across the customer journey.

  • Customers struggled to access necessary card usage information and had a tough time navigating essential card management functions, leading to increased reliance on customer service and hindering the customer experience.

  • Customers found the reward points system confusing and opaque, resulting in diminished engagement with the rewards program due to perceived lack of value.

  • The current ecosystem operated in silos, leading to disjoined customer experiences across different credit card management touch points. Customers sought a comprehensive solution to efficiently manage their cards.

Finding The Right Opportunity

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How might we enable customers to take end-to-end actions on their tasks and feel motivated to engage further with their card, and with the bank?

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Setting Strategic Directions

Collaborated with stakeholders to devise a future-oriented vision for change and established common CX goals.

  • Our primary aim was to create a seamless, self-service customer journey by integrating all vital credit card service and management functionalities across the value chain. Not only will this empower customers to make informed decisions, but it will also lighten the load on the bank’s customer support team. This strategy is aimed at reducing friction, promoting operational efficiency, and ultimately, enhancing customer satisfaction.

  • We strove to set industry benchmarks in design standards by delivering unparalleled usability across the primary digital touch points.

    The goal is to foster increased customer adoption of self-service journeys through user-friendly interfaces and intuitive functionalities. This approach will differentiate the bank’s services in the market and reinforce their commitment to customer-centric design.

  • We aimed to create a unified ecosystem that combines different products and services, allowing for streamlined cross-channel customer flows with the goal of encouraging cross-selling and enhancing service adoption. By incorporating gamification strategies within this ecosystem, we anticipated increased user engagement and higher spending per customer. This strategy underscored our focus on innovative customer engagement tactics while driving revenue growth for the bank.

Solution Strategy & Touch Point Design

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Impact-Effort Mapping

Conducted an Impact-Effort Mapping exercise with key stakeholders, helping us understand execution constraints, business priorities, and enabled us in building a business-aligned CX strategy, by prioritising the transformation across two phases: interim and long-term.

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Interim Solutions

Conducted Heuristic Evaluation of primary touch points to identify quick UX fixes and delivered design solutions to address the key pain points. Identified pilot and full launch KPIs to assess designs post-implementation, so as to test, learn, and iterate on the newly designed propositions across channels.

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Long-Term Solutions

Post-delivering the interim solutions, HFI was awarded two additional projects by HDFC Bank for the design of long-term solutions. I led both the work-streams, delivering digital design solutions for customer acquisition and rewards management.

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Design Samples: Interim Solution Delivery

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Design Samples: Long-Term Solution Delivery

Business Impact

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  1. The end-to-end design and delivery led to a 28% drop in customer support queries, underscoring decreased dependency on manual intervention by bank representatives.

  2. The newly designed digital customer acquisition journeys resulted in a reduction in new-customer drop-offs.

  3. The time taken by a bank representative to onboard new customers was reduced by 9 minutes via our digital customer acquisition journeys.

  4. Creation of a unified ecosystem for rewards saw increased customer engagement and cross-sell across the bank’s products & services.

Key Learnings

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  1. Illustrating the impact of design on business profitability is paramount for securing stakeholder buy-in, especially within the less design mature clients.

  2. It’s essential for businesses to ensure their back-stage technology and processes are optimised to deliver the front-stage experiences their customers anticipate.

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