Bankwest wished to increase their market share in the growing small business segment.

At the time, the operating complexity at Bankwest made it difficult to meet customer needs, and internal and external feedback revealed many pain points incurrent processes and their overall customer experience.

In order to mitigate this and increase customer retention and acquisition, Bankwest approached The Customer Experience Company (CEC) to transform their customer experience within a 3-5 year timeframe.

There were two focuses of the project; to define the target state future experience for the small business segment – and to build internal customer-centric design capabilities within the team.

As part of our work, we:

• Conducted contextual enquiries across the small business eco-system;
• Completed comparative and competitive reviews across the banking sector
• Future casted to provide Bankwest with innovative industry differentiators based on real customer needs
• Mapped the end-to-end business customer lifecycle and journey.

The research provided Bankwest with a series of insights and personas reflecting who their customers were and what their articulated and unarticulated needs were.

Working with the Bankwest team, we clearly articulated what the bank would like to stand for in the eyes of their customers and developed the experience vision and principles. We drafted future state experiences, tested them with customers and refined them based upon feedback.

50% of the tested concepts failed, reaffirming the importance of customer validation prior to investing in ideas.

After testing the concepts, we identified additional gaps and opportunities in the current processes that will lead to increased retention when addressed.

We delivered two Future Experience Playbooks for each of the business units; Home Owners and Small Business.

Each playbook included:

• The Customer Experience Design process we used to uncover customer needs
• The Exploration stage including; The research overview, insights and personas
• The Future State Experience including; guiding principles, future state concepts and design & testing methodology for both customers and brokers

Our capability uplift in Customer-led Innovation enabled Bankwest to continue to run internal capability-building initiatives within their business and is now a leading communications tool in attracting talent