HSBC GBA Wealth Connect

Account opening experience

  • My role
    UX UI Design
  • Duration
    3 months
  • Team 1 Design Lead, 2 UX Designers, 1 Service Designer

This is my first service design case study, originally I worked on the UX UI of investment trading only. To investigate the better digital experience, we try to view the experience from product UX to macro view, the whole service design.

Background

It was difficult to invest between Pearl River Delta and Hong Kong due to complex legal and regulatory restrictions. To strengthen the position of China Greater Bay Area (GBA) as a financial hub and facilitate cross-border trading and investment for GBA residents, “GBA Wealth Management Connect” is now allowed to be launched by Banks. This helps to bridge the gap and let customers meet their wealth management needs in GBA.

Challenges

Unclear internal communication​

As this was a brand new service which included teams and touchpoints in both sides of Hong Kong & China, we would need to have high level of collaboration between different departments and remove silos.

Missing a holistic view to design a smooth experience​

Each internal department ‘owned’ a part of the journey and there wasn’t a holistic end-to-end view to understand how the customer experiences the whole service.

Missing customer lenses​

There wasn’t much primary research data around the customer needs and pain points towards this service.

Identify the problem​

1. Customer Journey Map​

We try to map out the customer steps involved in the end-to-end experience across all touch points (Branch, phone, online, App, etc..)

• Thoughts — What will customer likely be thinking at that step?

• Emotions — What will customer likely to be feeling at this step?

• Channel — Through which channel/ touch point will this interaction happen?

• Pain Points / Opportunities — What pain point / opportunities are likely to arise?

• Teams Involved — This is not something typically added into a Customer Journey Map, but we wanted to have more clarity on which teams were involved at the different stages of the experience, as due to this project’s nature of being cross-border, there were so many players involved.

Digitalised the sticky notes to InVision Freehands

To illustrate the customer mental mode on considering the investment options, we changed the traditional linear mode to cyclical mode.

2. Service Blueprint​

Objective​

  • Define the roles and relationships between the teams required to support the customer journey
  • Specify the internal processes involved in supporting the customer journey.

Process​

Understand the process from documents provided by transformation team and $each of the operation departments

Draft the blueprint and verify the process with stakeholders in Service Blueprint Workshop

Output

  • Align on the business activities needed to support the customer experience
  • Discover any weaknesses within the internal activities
  • Identify opportunities for optimisation

3. Simplified Customer Journey Map​

The detailed CJM and Service Blueprint were used by the teams as the single source of truth for the customer journey and the whole service. It helped mitigate some of the previous pain points the team faced around the fragmented view of the service.

However, the CJM is not intended to be a panacea. As it’s filled with detail and requires a bit of time to digest all this information, it was understandable when stakeholders asked us whether we could synthesize it into a presentation slide. So later on we created a simplified version better suited for presentations that captures the essence.

 

  • Stages
  • Activities
  • Touchpoints
  • Time spending calculated from Service Blueprint (What customers and business care)
  • Illustrations (Really help to visualize and present to senior stakeholders)

Pain-point and huge step change on the service​

Based on the Service blueprint (What we are providing) and Customer journey map (What they expect), the major pain-points are obvious.

  • Cross-border
    It requires customers to travel cross-border, which is obviously impossible under the pandemic.
  • Time consuming
    Even though there’s no COVID, it’s time consuming for customers to cross-border and have at least 2 bank-visits, 4 days to activate the investment account.
  • Complicated steps
Thus, the team started to investigate the possibility of remote account opening. And our problem statement become:

Problem statement

How might we provide a smooth, simple REMOTE account opening experience to the customers?

Ideation​

  1. Turn face-to-face cross-border service to Remote service

  2. Reduce steps and documents if some are duplicated

Initial Research (Customer focus)​

Refine the service, research preparation​

We refine the services with:

  • Steps
  • Touchpoint (eg. Zoom, Phone call, iPad…)
  • Staff
  • Materials (eg. digital form, digital application prototype, dummy ID, passport… )

Insights and possible solutions​

  1. Accurate, clear information at the right time

    After the initial research, we found it’s important to let customers get accurate, clear information at the right time, otherwise customers will be confused and might even drop off the journey.
    For example, if customers forgot to bring personal documents to the branch, they cannot proceed with the account opening procedure, and customers may lose intention to visit the branch again. So it will be good to tell the To-bring list to customers at the end of the call, and give another reminder call/ SMS before the branch visit day.

  2. Let customers feel comfortable on the new service mode
    Remote account opening is new to most of the customers, it will build trust and make customers comfortable if staff introduce the remote procedure before it starts or even before the branch visit.

  3. Reduce steps and combine signature forms
    GBA Wealth Connect account includes actually 3 sub accounts (1 for China side, 2 for Hong Kong side), which includes nearly 10 forms, 3 Terms & Conditions documents. The complicated steps and forms make the procedure much more painful. We try to come up some possible solutions:

    –  Help customer pre-fill the info if they are existing customers
    –  Consolidate the forms and let customer sign at once
    –  Highlight key-point of T&C on screen and explain verbally to the customer

Point to the insight, revise, test and iterate​

Dry Runs (Operation + Customer)​

Based on the research insight, we revised the procedure. Together with the Transformation team, and other operation teams (Front-line staff, internal operation staff), we held several rehearsals of the whole account opening procedure, we call them Dry Runs.

We started to prepare Script Direction to ensure better communication during the process.

We have invited all levels of stakeholders: from front-line staff all the way to department heads to participate and observe the research in real-time. This is a crucial step for us to drive a customer-centered culture.

What’ve we achieved​

  1. After iterate the process of testing and adjustment, the whole account opening procedures reduced 35 mins time spending.
  2. Total number of documents to sign has reduced 4 in order to simplify the whole process, this improvement also reflected on the time spending.
  3. As of 3 Dec 2021, the service has processed transactions worth more than RMB 200 million since its launch on 19 Oct 2021.

We have also accomplished the following internally:

  • Gain management support to run and fund a design lead project that included research activities (many stakeholders participants research for first time)
  • We saw a high frequency of adaptation of internal team using our design deliverable (customer journey maps, service blueprint, operation materials)
  • Praise from senior stakeholders about how we successfully lead a project from a design angle and coordinated a complex project that involved so many departments

Future roadmap​

  1. Digitalise the experience
    Under the pedemic, customers tend to keep branch visits as little as possible. It’s also easy to manage the data if all of the forms become digital. Thus, we are planning to put the complicated account opening process to mobile devices.Identify possible edge cases, predict and prevent error cases

  2. Identify possible edge cases, predict and prevent error cases
    We’ve tested the major scenarios but there are always exceptions. The team is going to identify possible edge cases and of course test possible solutions.