If You Love Them, They’ll Come …(Back)

Another love story? maybe… but don’t tune out yet. As a designer and strategist, my passion is problem-solving. After starting my new job six months ago, I quickly realized that in order to prove the value of design for one of the largest and well-known brands in the financial service space, we would have to measure the impact of design. Since our service was a product subscription-based model, retention is definitely a key KPI that we are always trying to improve. As I started getting more familiar with our retention tactics, the team saw an opportunity to share several human-centered design (HCD) approaches that can help.

With HCD at the core of how we think, we believe displaying and fostering a love for our customers was paramount not only to our insights, but also to the brand. As we began gathering these insights from marketing and customer interviews, we combined qualitative and quantitative research for the What and the Why of the human psyche to make retention feel like a strong relationship between product/service and the customer.

Before giving into the urge of jumping deep into solutions, we decided to gut-check our early concepts with real users. Using low to mid-fidelity wireframes, we learned a lot and used this feedback to bring in business and marketing stakeholders so that they can start hearing directly from customers about what works and what doesn’t. This can be time consuming and painful upfront, but worth the investment.

Onboarding mobile concept testing with userlytics.com

What we love about this process is that it opens the door to a more inclusive and compassionate culture, while validating or invalidating ideas with different department heads. We believe as designers, we can be more objective in presenting ideas that are based not only on our expertise, but on user input.

Here are some of the ways we are showing love to our customers.

• Surprise and Delight — Acknowledge and celebrating small and large accomplishments. Who doesn’t like a little celebration when they reach a goal. We as humans are goal-oriented, it is programed in how we think! Also, never under estimate the power of a genuine “Thank you” message. Motion is another popular technique that brings digital interactions to life and guides the users as they complete their tasks.
• Give customers friendly reminders. Without annoying them, you simply want to offer genuine and useful suggestions that are non-intrusive and of course, based on their actual data. Our concepts allowed consumers to receive timely tips and reminders based on their behaviors and goals to nudge them in the right direction.
• Feedback loops. We have all heard about feedback loops, but putting them into practice and sticking with it can make all the difference. Including customers in the process early and often, empowers businesses to adapts to customer needs and gives customers ownership in the products they use and love.

*Many top brands have outperformed their competition 2-to-1 in part by embracing this type of design thinking.

Conclusion

These approaches have given us a foundation and talking points to help gather the resources needed to invest in experiences that provide real value and show customers that we care. We are still in the early stages of making it happen, but confidence is building that design can make a difference. As teammates, partners and consumers start feeling the love, product retention is not far behind.

*McKinsey Design Index scores

Please note — The postings and opinions expressed here are my own.