Interview
The Gist
- Customer-centric problem solving starts with understanding the "customer why." Understanding the customer's core problem is key to successful design and business strategies.
- Cross-functional alignment is essential for customer-centric design. It's not just the design team; technologists, product managers, data scientists, and marketers must also be aligned on customer needs.
- Incorporating customer feedback directly into the design process enhances success. Regularly involving customers in the design process ensures that the solutions are effective and meet their real needs.
In this interview on CMSWire TV's The Digital Experience, Dom Nicastro, editor-in-chief of CMSWire, sits down with Kaaren Hanson, chief design officer at Chase Bank, to discuss the significance of customer-centric design in creating better experiences.
Hanson shares insights on how Chase prioritizes customer needs by aligning cross-functional teams and incorporating customer feedback directly into the design process. The conversation delves into the challenges of balancing innovation with compliance in a highly regulated industry and the evolving role of AI in the design world.
Episode Highlights
- Getting started in design (0:05)
- Importance of customer-centric design (2:53)
- Role of data in customer-centric design (4:06)
- Innovating with customer feedback (6:12)
- Aligning cross-functional teams for customer-centricity (13:52)
- Balancing innovation with compliance (15:34)
- Leveraging AI in design (23:02)
Episode Transcript
Editor's note: This transcript was edited for clarity and brevity purposes.Getting Started in Design
Dom Nicastro: Hey everybody. Dom Nicastro here for another round of The Digital Experience, and we are honored to be joined by the Chief Design Officer at Chase Bank. Kaaren Hanson, what's going on?
Kaaren Hanson: Hello. Well, happy to be here.
Dom: Yeah, we are so happy to have you. We're glad we found you. You know, you're out and about there in the world. We gotta get something unique here. You've been in a lot of interviews.
Kaaren: We got a lot of good stories to tell. From Chase, what can I say?
Dom: You know what? Let's start there, because that means you're super passionate. You know, you're a practitioner at a very, very large bank. And you do not have to go out and, like, espouse your wisdom to the design world and the customer experience world, but here you are doing that. You know, you're obviously passionate behind that. So, you know, tell us how you got into this kind of role and what keeps you going every day.
Kaaren: Yeah. So, you know, it's interesting. So I'm actually a social psychologist by training, so I got my PhD at Stanford, out here on the West Coast, and from there, I was really looking at how do people process information. And it turns out you can either design experiences in a way that mimic how people process information, which is good, or you can design your experiences that basically reflect the organizational structure which is super bad, or the databases and the mainframes and the various tech stacks, which is also super bad.
And so I care a lot about people, and I have tremendous passion for making sure that we are creating experiences that work for how regular people think. And the reason I'm so passionate about this is because all of us run into terrible experiences every day. That is true for our elderly parents, that is true for young people. And when people are running into bad experiences, they're often not necessarily often, but they periodically make decisions that may not be actually what they want to do, or they may not feel good about it as they're doing it, and that's something we can change.
And I do believe that the ways in which we've changed how we're working at Chase are applicable to every other company out there. And so I think a lot of these techniques are not difficult to adopt. It just takes persistence.
Related Article: Improving Customer Experience With Human-Centric Design
Importance of Customer-Centric Design
Dom Nicastro: About customer-centric design. Now I get a little skeptical with that term, Kaaren, you know, because why? How can't it be customer-centric design? But as you said in the opening, many organizations have proved that they roll out design without the customer in mind. So you know, what does that term generally mean to you? It’s obvious that we should be doing it. But what does it mean at its core for you?
Kaaren: Well, I think it also goes back to what do we actually mean by design? And some people think of designs as just pixels and making something pretty. But the reality is, design is a form of problem solving, and it is a form of customer-centric problem solving.
But it's interesting, because when I talk about being customer-centric, it's not just about the design team being customer-centric, Yes, it is that. And it's also, how do we get everybody else to be customer-centric? So, for example, I can create the strongest design team in the world, and if we don’t also have customer-centric, you know, technologists and product managers and data scientists and marketers, and if we're not all aligned together on that customer problem. It won't matter.
Role of Data in Customer-Centric Design
Dom: Yeah, my newspaper days, you know, before I was in the digital media world, we used to do our story budget for the day, and I would say, we pitch a story, we forced ourselves to ask this question, why should the reader care? Who is the reader that cares about this right back then, there was no data to show us. There was just subscriptions. Oh, the subscriptions went up so people might like our content. Oh, we didn't get as many calls, so keeping the customer at heart a big part of that is data. Data, data, right?
How much of your day to day would you say is data, you know, looking at analytics on, let's say, the Chase mobile app, or what have you how much, how much are you buried in data? If maybe you're not that buried?
Kaaren: I mean, no, we have data coming out of our ears. There's no question about that. But again, I think the issue is, how are we looking that? From a customer centric lens. And so one of the things that we have our team start with, we call it the customer why statement? Other people call it a customer problem statement, which is more the vernacular in the design industry, but essentially it has the team align around what is the customer problem that we're solving?
And it uses customer-centric phrases, like, I am a blank I am trying to blank, right? What is the job you're trying to accomplish? And we talk about the job to be done, because customers want to do a job. They want to get paid.
For example, if they're a small business, that's what they're trying to do. And so it might be, I am a small business customer, I am trying to get paid, but and then we talk about the difficulty they're encountering. Do we use data to help us create this? Absolutely, but we're not blind to the data. We're using our judgment.
And again, it's really important that the team aligned around this, so that then we know this is a problem we're solving, and from there, we can figure out what is the metric for success, and in the case of trying to get paid, well, the metric for success is, how quickly did you get paid, right? It's pretty straightforward. And so that's the measure of success you're looking at primarily. Are there others? Sure, but is that the most important? 100%.
Related Article: What Is Customer Experience Design? Benefits & Best Practices
Innovating With Customer Feedback
Dom: Can you think of a recent example where you took that information, iterated, and improved the experience?
Kaaren: Well, I would say, you know, we run experiments all the time, and so we have little findings all over the place. But I'm actually going to talk about a finding out that was particularly interesting.
So we have something that we call a credit journey, and we've had it for a few years, and it essentially allows people to understand what their credit score is, right? And people are very interested in knowing how they're doing on all kinds of dimensions, including their credit score. And so that was all well and good, and people were very happy with it, and they were really engaging with it, but the team went back to wait a second, what is the customer problem we're trying to solve?
And frankly, most people are not just trying to look at their credit score. Many of them are actually trying to improve their credit score, right? So the team took that information and it was like, Okay, well, then how are we going to help them to improve their credit score? Their measure was for success, was higher credit ratings.
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And so they created something that we call, you know, basically something that helps them to improve their score, the score planner. And with that, we actually found that customers, over time, eventually increase their score, about about 30 points, right? It didn't happen immediately.
It's because first we tried things that maybe didn't help customers increase their score, right? And we found out that the more concrete, the more specific, the more likely people were to take those opportunities and do it, and also the more we were being really reflective about realistically, what could you improve over what time frame, right?
So again, like all of those, were little examples of experiments that we ran that taught us a lot along the way. And frankly, I think that when we're being most successful, it's because we are being humble and we're like, well, this is what we think. It's true. Let's find out.
Related Article: What Is Design Thinking for CX?
Aligning Cross-Functional Teams for Customer-Centricity
Dom: I want to stick with the credit score examples. I love playing off of one thing and explaining how you innovate, how you collaborate around one mission. So we already talked about how you got the data. That's cool. Now, who gets involved from the jump? When you say, we know what they want from us, what teams get involved in that? Because I think, I think design people love to know the friends that are around them to get to the where they want to go.
Kaaren: Well, and what I'd say is, it's not that when we want to do this, that's when we get involved. You get the empowered team together, and you say to the team, let's go after this general problem space. You guys figure out what makes sense. And so in that case, the team is product, it's engineering, it's data and it's design, and we talk about as the quad.
Now increasingly, we're talking about the quad plus, which is where we're bringing marketing in. And so again, if you think about, you know, credit score, and how you're going to improve your credit score, that's the benefit to the customers. I'm going to improve my score. So we want to make sure we're marketing that benefit as well as making sure we're actually creating that benefit.
And then the other part you wants the team aligned around, how do I do it in a way that's really easy for this customer and that feels good, right? Not shameful, because you could imagine how you can play with different words. And some of the words might be shameful if your credit score is low, right? As opposed to great. You know what? We're here to help, right?
So how are you playing with that as well. And again, those three factors, customer benefit, easy to use and then also feeling good, those account for most of the Net Promoter Score that people report.
Related Article: What Is Net Promoter Score (NPS)?
Balancing Innovation With Compliance
Dom Nicastro: How do you balance personalized customer experience, great design, being free, innovating with compliance in a heavily regulated industry?
Kaaren: Well, I mean, we take compliance incredibly seriously, right? And so whatever the rules are, we follow them. Now, having said that, what we found is that it's been very useful to work with legal ahead of time and to create what we call almost playbooks. This is the spaces where we're never going to play. This is what was always okay.
And here's the gray area we're going to work with you. The other thing we found to do helpful, to be helpful, is to bring in legal and compliance into these co-design sessions, because then they're hearing what customers say, and they're understanding the language, and they're understanding what's confusing, because, again, that helps us all understand the same problem space.
And then in addition, we'll ask, we'll be like, great, is that the law, or is that your personal opinion? Help me understand the law? Again, everybody's really well intentioned, but sometimes what you're hearing is just a personal opinion, right? In which case, totally great. We're interested in personal opinions as well, and that's different from this. Is the law, yeah. Does that make sense? It does.
Leveraging AI in Design
Dom: How is AI infused into the design world? So let's wrap with that.
Kaaren: So what I'd say is, I think AI is still in its infancy. I think we're trying a lot of different items. One area we found it to be very helpful in our experiments is actually with those call center agents. So what we found is that we can use, you know, ChatGPT and other large language models to look at all the information that's in the knowledge base and come up with what the likely answer is.
Now it's still really important to us, because we take our customers so seriously, and because we have such a tremendous responsibility to them, that we have an actual person looking to make sure that that is indeed the right answer and that it does make sense, but it does help our agents to really go through tremendous amounts of information in a much more effective time frame. We're also playing with other things.
So for example, if you look at the chase app or our website, you'll see that there's a particular illustration style, and so we're playing with, well, could we use generative AI to generate similar illustrations as we need them? Now, again, would that ever just go into our app? Absolutely not, right. We're going to make sure that a human reviews it, and that it actually does make sense, but that, I think is a really interesting application. So we're always playing with what's out there and what else we might, we might try.
Dom: I love it. I look at AI as an intern. I'm like, yeah, go ahead, let the intern do it, and then after check that, you know? So that's AI. That's AI. It's amazing what it can do. You’re amazing. Well, you've been a wonderful guest, Kaaren. I appreciate it very much. I think the design world is better off from all your wisdom that you're putting out there in the world. And we were lucky to have you. So thank you very much. Is there something you wanted to share, like, where folks can follow you, your thought leadership, LinkedIn, or any other time?
Kaaren: LinkedIn. And what I would say is this is not even just for designers, right? This is just how can companies create better experiences? Love it. And yes, design is an important vector, but that's one part of the overall solution.
Dom: Dom Nicastro, CMSWire, The Digital Experience show. Kaaren Hanson of Chase Bank, chief design officer, we appreciate you coming on the digital experience with CMSWire TV. Thank you. Have a good one.
Kaaren: Bye.
