At 150 people, it is the largest digital design organization within
Before, "it wasn't the headline goal," said Evan English, who leads Enterprise Design & Research at the company. "We were always measuring it, but now it's anchoring a lot of the roadmaps we have."
The digital customer experience has long been viewed in banking as an "efficiency play," said Benjamin Seesel, vice-president of advisory at consulting firm Gartner. "'Let's save the customer time. Let's save them money.' That worked for a long time."
While that aspect is important, it's also vital to think about the complex needs customers have and how to solve them, he said. Gartner research finds that customers who primarily use the branch often give more positive feedback than those who primarily use digital. One reason is branch bankers are better at helping customers solve problems and delivering relevant, timely advice than digital methods.
Mature financial services firms are increasingly formalizing their design functions. Zachary Paradis, global vice-president of customer experience and innovation consulting at consulting firm Publicis Sapient, observes three main ways that companies structure such groups: an embedded model where teams float throughout the business without clear leadership; the more-formal "center of excellence" model that has only modest influence in the company; and the "best in class" system, with dedicated teams, strong leadership and decision-making power.
"The more mature [the organization] gets, the more formalized the craft gets, and it becomes more baked into the operating model," said Paradis.
As Amex
"The more we added to our business, the more we added to our digital channels, so we had to rethink the way those channels were structured," said English.
American Express has built platforms to help smaller brands quickly bring credit cards to market and for B2B software companies to embed virtual cards.
Customer needs become more complex as they adopt more products and services, and "the more they need to see when they log in," she said. "Design plays a significant role in thinking through how that all comes together." For instance, how should a checking account appear for someone who already has an Amex credit card? Are the digital properties using consistent patterns and color palettes, or do certain areas call for a unique palette?
The
Previously, the cards were mailed to the customer's residence where they would need to activate and set up their digital login.
"We weren't thinking about the entire customer journey," said Ryan Cailliet, vice-president of product design and research at Amex.
This unification of membership and acquisition design "has removed silos and transitioned us from thinking about channel or product-specific needs to assessing customer experience as a whole," said English. The company set up a central repository of design components, such as fonts and colors, and user experience patterns that all teams can reference for a consistent look across the board. A user experience pattern is a part of the interface that will appear in multiple places within a website or app, such as forms or pop-ups.
The feeling of lock-in to a particular bank or financial services company "is increasingly in the past," said Paradis. "Financial services [firms] are recognizing what other industries have recognized, which is that experience matters and it drives business performance."
About five years ago, Amex also started rethinking how it measures digital satisfaction within the website and mobile app. Its user research practice has nearly doubled in size since 2018, said English, and started soliciting more customer input during the discovery and delivery phases rather than focusing mainly on usability testing. Amex surveys now measure satisfaction with specific digital journeys a customer might take, such as making a payment or redeeming a gift card, and how visual appearance, performance and navigation factor in.
Since Amex started uniting disparate design teams under Enterprise Design & Research it has observed higher customer engagement and satisfaction, although the company declined to provide specifics.
Seesel has seen significant interest in recent years among financial services firms in addressing "client journeys" more holistically. Many are launching cross-functional, or fusion teams, that span multiple parts of the business.
There are design challenges Amex is still trying to solve. One is visually representing different consumer or business bank accounts online or in the app. Customers with multiple Amex credit cards can click through a carousel of images of their cards; the company wants to find something similarly appealing for its bank accounts.
"The evolution of our website and mobile app from focusing on individual card products to a more holistic view of a customer's relationship with Amex is a multi-year journey," said Danny Forst, vice-president of product design.
