Doug's Digital Transformation Journey: Understanding The Customer's Experience

Katie was impressed by the market research that had been done and the potential opportunities it presented and was especially intrigued by the digital solutions that competitors in the industry were offering their customers. B|G and Doug shared with Katie their intention to examine the customer’s experience through WealthArrow’s processes. They needed to identify exactly what a typical customer is thinking, doing, and feeling through the sales and onboarding process. The best place to start was by pooling together current customers, employees, and trusted partners to engage in journey mapping.

Doug and B|G began hosting workshops for these stakeholders, asking several questions, hearing many stories, and listening to various opinions on issues their customers commonly face. They started discussions with basic questions about who their perfect customer was: what goals do they want to achieve in engaging WealthArrow? What has their past experience with financial services companies been like?  Where were they feeling pain? Answering such questions would provide the building blocks to quality journey mapping and the development of WealthArrow’s strategic digital transformation.

With an increased understanding of the customer, Doug and B|G were able to create journeys of several customer personas, each with their own predictable experience during WealthArrow’s sales and onboarding process. This allowed them to essentially look at the process from a bird’s eye view and see which areas need the most improvement. Furthermore, they could acknowledge the areas in which data could be leveraged. In the long run, this would lead to more sales and a higher retention rate.

A particular pain point that was identified during journey mapping was the frustrations customers shared during the onboarding process. Doug, B|G, and the other session participants all came to the agreement that they needed to improve onboarding as customers had to go through painstaking processes in order to receive service from WealthArrow. For instance, a customer had to input their contact information multiple times during the onboarding processes and sign various paper documents. This process was deemed as inefficient and journey mapping participants felt it lowered customer satisfaction even before services were provided to the customer.

With a holistic understanding of the industry, the organization and its customers, Doug and B|G took their first confident step into WealthArrow’s digital transformation.

Missed the first two parts of the series? View Part 1 and Part 2.

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