Maximising customer experience technology

We recently met up with David, head of customer experience and security at Barclays, to chat about his job and customer experience at Barclays.

So David, head of customer experience and security, what exactly are the responsibilities of your role?
In simple terms it’s all about making sure that everything that the team here does is customer centric, and that we are involved at the design stage of any changes that are made. We are there to ensure that that the customer viewpoint is always taken into account, and we do that by maintaining a regular dialogue with our customers and our helpdesks.  We also conduct usability sessions, double-checking that what we’re doing is truly fit for purpose. One thing I enjoy doing is sitting in with our online banking helpdesk, which can be very revealing. When our customers are in difficulty, they phone us, so I sit down with our advisors once a month and try to understand their issues. As you probably know we record these calls. Using this information and a number of other feedback mechanisms, we work to identify bottlenecks, champion changes, and drive out the real issues. The ‘security’ part of my job title involves mitigating the risks for online banking. Our team has been instrumental in leading the development of things like ‘PINsentry’. We then communicate these changes and instruments to our customers. It’s perhaps an unusual blend of responsibilities, but for me it works very well. By wearing both hats I get to witness the extremes of both security and usability, so that I can genuinely understand what customers will use and how secure they feel.

And what types of technology are you directly involved with?
Basically we’re responsible for anything and everything digital across public and online banking, including the optimising of our pages for mobile devices. So that’s the kiosks, internet terminals and online banking facilities within our local branches, all our core customer facing website services, and content for the small screen. The mobile area is actually quite exciting at the moment – we’ve designed different levels of services so that customers can very easily view balances, debits and other quick stuff on the go by visiting the specific mobile URL – www.barclays.mobi -  but then take the PINsentry route once they reach a desk to make secure payments. Other cool stuff we’ve helped develop purely for mobile users includes a new mobile branch and ATM locator and ‘Click to call’ – if text support doesn’t help, then we now provide a direct click-through to voice support, direct and seamlessly from the handset.

Is the old total redesign approach to website development a thing of the past?
We continuously adapt design features to better fit our user as you go. It’s an iterative approach. So a lot is tweaking, but it is possible for this to produce major enhancements, such as a revolutionary front end, fundamental rebranding, completely reorganising navigation, and so on. We work to improve on what we have, keeping the basics right as well as adding new elements.

How do you collect customer feedback about online banking at Barclays?
As well as the techniques I’ve already mentioned, we have already conducted usability sessions and, taken onboard all the feedback we received to guide the redesigning of our site. We aim to stay ahead of the game, using any new technologies available within the internet space to allow customers to personalise their site as well. We will make full use of Flash and Java, and we’re also working hard on persona work, examining different types of customers and what they are likely to look for in an online bank.

How do you usually act on the feedback in order to make these changes?
There’s no substitute for lots of work with customers and with usability tests. Actually, it’s all been going so well recently that we’re putting tests on hold for a little while. Right now we’re getting the results we anticipate, so we will continue to develop along these lines and put it back in front of customers at a more mature stage. We’ve already allowed our customers to pilot our new look and feel. We invited 3000 customers to access a live service on a test bed so that they could interact properly with the new site, give us real feedback, tell us how we were performing in meeting their requirements, then use that feedback to make service changes before we pushed out live to our whole customer base.

How do you manage to balance the sales effort with the experience effort for the consumer?
Ultimately we sell products and services through these digital channels, so we must bring our sales team as close as possible to the customer. To do this we use a ‘huddle board’ – we choose a high level process (such as overdrafts for example), and collect all the screenshots, analytics and click data, before trying to establish a rationale for why customers might not complete a particular process. We then brainstorm ways to amend the process, examine what our customers are saying about the process, and what their suggestions are. We overlay all this and then get the guys responsible for that particular product and walk them through the process in question to see how we can enhance the process and improve the user journey. In this way, we effectively improve sales by improving the customer experience.

So, apart from the big interface redesign, what’s next for you and your team?
We have aggressive activation targets. More and more of our customers are using our online space, so they are becoming more net savvy all the time. For some people a cheque is actually more complicated to use than digital channels. A webchat would be second nature, but balancing a chequebook just isn’t. The next step I guess is working out how best to embrace social media – Twitter, blogs and so on – in personal finance. We’re certainly looking for comments around the services we provide and want to know what people are saying amongst themselves about us. We need to address any issues that these platforms throw up. Maybe we will join that dialogue. We’re thinking about it, but it must be done right.

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