Crafting Messaging for a New Service Experience
Project Description
A Fortune 500 wealth management company engaged Doblin (Deloitte Digital) to identify and develop innovation opportunities across its business. As part of that effort, the company began working toward a sizeable horizontal innovation project to develop a revamped customer and employee experience around its core offerings. The refresh included new tools for working with customers to understand and track financial goals and new ways of working to make customers’ and employees’ experiences more seamless. My team and I we were asked to help the client better understand how to communicate the value of this refresh to customers in ways that resonate.
Project Role
Lead Researcher
Client Industry
Wealth Management
Project Type
Product Messaging Research
Project Duration
9 weeks
Research Methods
In-depth Interviews, Card Sorts, Prototyping
My Role
The team, which consisted of myself (research lead), a design lead, and a project manager, was brought on to develop an artifact that helps the client to frame customer and employee communications around its new service experience (still in development). Specifically, our task was to 1) understand which features of the new experience were seen by customers and employees as differentiators, 2) articulate how the differentiators provide value to each user group, and 3) develop a tool to facilitate the communication of resonant messaging to customers and employees.
My Work
At the start of this project, the client’s new service experience was not clearly defined; however, they were able to provide a list of feature descriptions and value proposition messages that would likely come to define the new experience. We used this as the basis of our research with approximately ten customers and ten branch employees. Our research objectives were as follows:
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Research Objectives
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Understand the perceived benefits provided by the new experience relative to the current experience,
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Investigate the different attributes, behaviors, and preferences of customers that align closest to specific features of the experience,
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Understand which features resonate most and which features do not resonate
Because we wanted to understand participants’ attitudes around their service experience, we decided that utilizing in-depth interviews would be the best approach. We developed an interview guide that included sections to investigate these objectives.
The guide's first section contained questions aimed at understanding participants' general attributes, behaviors, and preferences relative to their investing experience in the case of customers and work experience in the case of branch employees.
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The second section of the guide sought to understand the perceived benefits of the new experience. Due to the potential ambiguity in how research participants interpret feature descriptions and value proposition messages, I adopted a scenario-based approach to articulate and solicit feedback on the new service experience.
The team and I, along with input from the client, developed a series of scenarios for three to four major components of the new experience based on the provided features and value proposition messages. Each component included a scenario that described the current service experience and one that described the new service experience. This approach allowed us to understand users’ perceptions of the current experience, the new experience, and the differences between the two.
The third section of the interview guide consisted of a card sort of the value proposition messages provided by the client. We asked participants to share their thoughts on what each message communicated, sort the value propositions in order of importance, and share why they ranked them as they did.
Through our research, we determined which features resonated most with participants, what further information was needed to understand those that were unclear, and why certain other features did not resonate as much.
Once we socialized the research insights throughout the organization, the team switched gears to
begin concepting and prototyping a tool to help the client better communicate the value of the new
service experience. We quickly realized we were in a tough place because our client was still determining
the specifics of what its new service experience would provide. This meant that there was a possibility that the value prop messages we tested through research were not final and were subject to change. Understanding this, we concluded that the most valuable artifact we could provide would be a tool that outlines the most critical types of information to share about any new service features and illustrates how to communicate the value of those features.
The Result
Ultimately, we delivered a modular communication guide that included the design of a process for communicating the value of the new experience to customers and a template that illustrated how to capture each feature's value and how to communicate it to individuals in ways that resonate.
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My Reflection
What stands out about this project is that despite the client's lack of clarity on what its new service experience would entail, we were able to meet them where they were and provide a deliverable that fulfilled our brief and helped them push forward with development. Sometimes, you have to pivot due to uncontrollable circumstances, but there is often still a way to provide something of real value.
