Case Study: Close an account

The ability to close an account sounds like a simple feature, however, this work took years to accomplish. It involves complex FINRA regulations, messy tax implications, internal politics, and limitations on an existing interface.

Question

It started with the following question:

Why are so many customers calling us to close their accounts?

In 2016, our group was responsible for digitizing services. These services were traditionally done on paper or over the phone. I was working on a squad that was responsible for anything related to a customer’s profile.

Discover

To better understand why customers wanted to close their accounts, we took part in the following activities:

• Metrics
  We wanted to understand the opportunity size (i.e., # of calls, conversation reviews, etc.)

• Call listening
  We wanted to hear firsthand what our customers were saying and start to gain empathy for how they were feeling.

• Rep focus groups
  We wanted to gather any insights from front-line associates fielding these inquiries.
  

Define

Based on our findings from the discovery phase, we were able to determine that from July 1, 2016, to December 21, 2016, we received 428,507 calls related to account closings. At roughly $25 per call, we had the opportunity to save the firm $11 M. We were able to group our customer problems into categories. Even though the largest percentage is around helping customers get their money, our team felt that we had the most control and influence over the 19% - Residual Divs/Interest.

After synthesizing all of the information, we wanted to create a customer journey map (based on the use case we identified) to share with our business and dev partners. The goal of this journey map was to help create empathy for our customers while also getting buy-in from our partners.

Develop

Now that we identified our opportunity and use case, here is where we started to create solutions that could address our customer problem.

Obstacle

Before we could test our ideas, our company went through a re-organization. I was moved to a newly created squad, which was responsible for Fidelity’s Virtual Assistant. A few years go by and the customer problem is still not addressed. As a small, scrappy squad looking to save the firm money, we decide to revisit this work. This time though, we do it through the lens of conversational design.

Re-define

After reviewing all of the information we originally gathered and verifying that it continued to remain a problem, we decided to tackle a related use case that we had complete control over (5% - Opened in error). We noticed that many of our customers were calling us, and asking our Virtual Assistant, to close their $0 balance accounts.

Our hypothesis was

By allowing customers the ability to close their accounts online we would avoid a phone call and allow our reps to answer more complex questions and it would improve customer satisfaction.

Target Goal

We set a target goal of deflecting 10% of our calls per month, which is roughly 4,200 calls per year.

Deliver

After 4 years, we were finally able to help our customers close an account online. Today, the Virtual Assistant is the only way to close an account.

In addition, we were able to deflect 8 times as many calls as we targeted, saved the firm $300K, and improved the user experience for our customers.