providing the right tools for employees
Sector: Financial services
Company: Banco de Credito del Peru (BCP)
Role: Design Research, Employee Experience
Date: 2019 & 2020
THE CONTEXT
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BCP is the largest owned financial institution in Peru, with the highest branch capillarity.
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BCP's key objectives are to operate efficiently in the market and give an extraordinary experience; however, there is an ongoing tension between both objectives.
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In order to provide an extraordinary experience, the bank has mapped out 7 employee journeys.
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The "Day-to-day Journey" (work processes) represents 30% of all pains at the branches.
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The challenge was to define what factors impacted the most and how to improve the employee experience at the branches and call centers before and after the pandemic.
THE design PROcess
I led the design activities on this projects and collaborated with another design researcher for the shadowing and focus groups phases.
1st research (5 weeks - 2019)
2nd research (4 weeks - 2020)
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Desk Research
Shadowing, Focus Groups & Interviews
Co-creation
Workshop
COVID-19
Surveys
Shadowing,
Digital Etnography,
Focus Groups
Surveys
* Due to the proprietary nature of this work, the case study will discuss my process and some of the work but at very high level.
the 1st research (before covid-19)
desk research
As an input for the research project, I collected studies from different areas including , metrics, surveys, previous research and baseline results from each touchpoint within the employee journey.
UNDERSTANDING THE USERS' NEEDS
GOALS
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Define what factors impact the the work routine and "day to day" experience for branch and call center employees.
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Understand a regular day at a branch or call center, identifying communication channels, tools, touch points and pain points.
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Discover work arounds for day to day problems.
tools
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Shadowing
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Focus groups
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Interviews (one type of the user groups could not attend the focus groups, so we switched to individual interviews)
user groups
7 user groups
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5 user groups from branches
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2 user groups from call centers
shadowing
My-coworker and I accompanied the branch and call center employees throughout a week.
Branch employees had 2 computers, 2 mouses and 2 keyboards (one for each system they operated).
Call center employees had a mirror to see if they were happy or angry when talking to clients
Constant errors limited the work performance and client service.
There are no chairs for the employees who change shifts. They have to wait standing behind the current shift. Others used trash bins to sit on (image on the left).
focus groups
To complement the previous phase, we carried out 7 focus groups (each for a different user group).
The questions where divided into 2 themes: Journey of the day-to-day routine, and Work tools mapping
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Journey of the day-to-day routine:
The participants put together their journey consideren phases before, during and after their workday. -
Work tools mapping:
The participants were asked to define what is a "work tool" for them.
They put together a matrix of considering indispensable vs. working correctly.
They rated how satisfied they were with work tools and shared the best and worst experiences.
The information from each focus group was collected and analyzed.
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* Sample from the information collected. Blurred content due to the proprietary nature.
THE DISCOVERIES
I analyzed the information from the shadowing, focus groups and interviews to look cross-sectional and individual patterns.
The research pointed out 3 large cross-sectional patterns:
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W O R K D A Y
Before I was happy with being part-time, but now I work full time being part-time. I can't spend more than 20 minutes for lunch because I prioritize answering back clients.
D E P E N D E N C I E S
Help Desk takes ages to assist you, they live at a different pace. They are less and less prepared, and most of all disinterested.
O W N R E S O U R C E S
I kept running out of data and I could not contact clients, so I changed the chip to use my own data plan instead. I also asked for a portable phone charger at the office's Christmas gift exchange to use with clients.
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Overall, the employees had a feeling of frustration and confusion while performing their jobs.
We have become more agile, but the processes and systems have not. How can I perform as required if I am not given the tools I need? Sometimes it is really hard, I must go to the bathroom, breathe, and then walk out with a smile to receive the next client.
Each user group was positioned in a "pain scale" to identify which users were being impacted the most.
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* General User Group Pain Scale. Blurred content due to the proprietary nature.
Each user group was then deeply analyzed, highlighting the role, goals and issues that impacted the most.
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* Sample from the user group analysis. Blurred content due to the proprietary nature.
BUILDING EMPATHY
The qualitative information collected throughout the project was crossed with an investigation carried out by the Processes unit to post and track the hours worked by employees and to identify on what were they spending most of their time vs what brought more value for them. Using both qualitative and quantitative information, I illustrated a persona to represent the needs, goals and design principles of one of the user groups (the one on the extreme of the pain scale). The persona was used for stakeholders to better emphasize with the main user group and to facilitate discussions about the needs, desires and contexts during a workshop. The objective was for participants to refer to this persona throughout the ideation process, and afterwards to serve as a reference for the implementation team.
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* Persona created for one of the user groups. Blurred content due to the proprietary nature.
searching for alternative solutions
It was important to involve stakeholders as part of the design process. I held a workshop to get input from key stakeholders across the units involved in order to bring stakeholders along the design process and receive feedback.
I structured and facilitated the workshop of 15 participants.
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Trigger cards used for the second round of ideation
Some of the participants throughout the workshop.
After coming up with a long list of alternative solutions, each team of participants began prioritizing the initiatives on a Ease vs Impact Matrix. All of the proposals were synthesized on a single matrix.
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*Ease and Impact Matrix with all the initiatives from the workshop. Blurred content due to the proprietary nature.
THE next steps
After handing off my research and strategic recommendations to the HR team, my role on the project became the one of advisor and voice from the users for each of the milestones during the implementation phase. I am always providing the HR team with my own feedback and also from other end-users.
Thanks to the workshop, stakeholders got a look at the bigger picture in order to question the current rol and model of the user group analyzed. The re-definition of the user group became a new project carried out at the Branches unit.
the 2nd research (during covid-19)
The COVID-19 Pandemic came along with several changes, so a second research was carried out on 2020 to update the information from the previous year.
UNDERSTANDING THE USERS' NEEDS
SHAdowING
12 branch offices were visited throughout a whole week to experience first hand how the client attention had changed during the pandemic. Since the very first days of the pandemic, changes were made to protect clients and employees, such as acrylic windows at all the desks and a new safety station at the front door (an extra task for the guides at the main hall). However, some difficulties for employees regarding the acrylic windows is that they make it harder to communicate, resulting in the advisors constantly having to stand up to talk and listen to client requirements. For branch guides, having to greet employees at the door, take their temperature and sanitize them involved an extra task that took a lot of time and left them with less time to help clients in the hall.
Despite the difficulties involving COVID-19, the largest difficulties for branch employees were still the same as the previous year regarding computer systems, connection and internal dependencies.
Acrylic windows on the left.
Safety station and branch guide (white scrubs) on the right.
Branch advisors standing up and leaning towards the acrylic windows to communicate better with clients.
DIGITAL ETHNOGRAPHY
6 chat groups with different branch profiles were created in order to carry out digital ethnographies and understand the difficulties employees face as part of their daily routine. The conversations maintained confirmed what was observed during the shadowing phase: the main frustration for employees is to reach ambitious goals with tools that work ineffectively and slow.
Error messages and screens shared by participants.
Images that described how employees felt: frustrated, worried and stressed.
VIRTUAL Focus groups
The most participative employees from the digital ethnopgraphies were selected to be part of several focus groups carries out to dig deeper on specific topics regarding the work routine during the pandemic. 6 virtual focus groups were carried out using a visual board to portray what the participants were discussing.
One of the boards from the focus group.
MAKING SENSE OF THE INFORMATION
As the research was carried out during the pandemic, I worked with a virtual board to make sense of the information. Quotes, insights and pictures were included, analyzed and clustered into 4 large topics and 7 subtopics. I used this as input to create the story to be told and build the presentation deck for the stakeholder presentation.
Analysis board with clustered information.
next steps
After handing off the research to the HR team to serve as input to make adjustments to the work experience at the branches, a survey should be launched to quantify the issues among the +10K employees.
see other projects
MAKING REMOTE CHANNELS THE FIRST CHOICE
How might we turn remote advisors into the main interaction channel, leaving the bank branches as the last option?