Centering customers’ personalities and preferences is a complex maze for banks and financial institutions, motivating them to rely on experts in concepts such as design thinking.
- •Design thinking is a problem-solving concept that allows individuals to test ideas and refine solutions before launching them, deviating from dependence on statistics and focusing on how it will impact clients.
- •According to a study by KPMG, 47% of bank customers influenced to select a financial service and would ungrudgingly pay for it if the experience is wholesome.
- •For banks to achieve this level of customer satisfaction, a responsive and human-centered approach is needed to enable them match up to the efficiency displayed by emerging fintechs.
“We look at the touch points where the customers interacting with this products. The branches tell us how they are interacting with the customers and look at the people facilitating the layer of these services,” Lynnet Kamau, a design director at Marathon XP told The Kenyan Wall Street recently.
Marathon XP is an experience design firm with offices in Johannesburg, Nairobi, and Barcelona. The firm helps innovative products from banks to seamlessly navigate their customer base by employing the design thinking concept.
Although banks are desperate to remain relevant in the future, Lynnet says that there is a bit of skeptism in the executives’ part. Design thinking, despite being a clearly simple concept in theory, needs to consider very specific problems which can be difficult to identify.
“A lot of banks are not willing to experiment and this makes innovation to move quite slowly. You find that newer entities come up with interesting products that offer the same products as banks, only more efficiently. Banks end up losing customers to fintechs and neobanks,” Lynnet said in an interview with The Kenyan Wall Street.
Many banks in Kenya still operate in ‘silo systems’, which can impede a smooth transition to innovative customer solutions. Silos are departmental barriers that prevent easier visibility of a bank’s objectives thus scattering communication. For design thinkers, general involvement of all the bank’s stakeholders is required from the beginning to the end of a project.
Banks have a hard time adopting design thinking because they are more likely to act when a problem arises. Saving their image becomes a priority instead of digging deeper to understand why something has happened and what could be done to mitigate it. Design thinking provides a clear-cut strategy for dealing with problems related to customer satisfaction.
“Banks also tend to forecast in short-term gains as opposed to long-term gains which has been a challenge because design thinking always requires someone to think long-term and more strategically as opposed to the reactive,” Lynnet said.
A human-centered design maps out the expectations of customers based on their current perceptions, providing a full view of which products need to be established or iterated. Design thinking incorporates a mindset of experimentation in banks, allowing them to explore diverse ways they can impact their customers and become more profitable.
“The foundation of what we do is research because we believe that to solve problems, we need to understand the pin points and the expectations of the future. What we try to do is breaking silos in a bank’s back-end. If the back-end is not communicating, they wouldn’t be able to offer great experiences for their customers,” Lynnet added.
Marathon XP gauges the success of a design thinking process using a variety of metrics including the Net Promoter Score (NPS). They also determine the feedback of bank customers in social media platforms, taking stock of which banks they prefer and the services they offer.
Furthermore, design thinking enables banks to tailor different experiences for customers in various income ranges. Different customers have different needs which need to be understood keenly before splurging a solution.