3. How do we improve our
registration process?
The problem
• Get the customer ready to transfer in less
than 15 mins.
• Provide a self serve out of the box
experience
• Enable personalisation journeys for
customers
• Scale business process by automating &
validating in real time – Increase STP
• Enable global business process standards
Current journey to target state
journey
9. What we will do
differently next
time?
Last words
10. Level 19, 60 Margaret Street, Sydney NSW 2000 Australia. www.ofx.com
www.linkedin.com/in/hughmacdermott
Notes de l'éditeur
Hello – my name is Hugh Macdermott and I am the Head of Product for OFX
OFX is one of the world’s leading international money transfer companies. With operations in Australia, New Zealand, North America, Europe and Asia, we aim to provide our customers with an excellent digital experience supported by 24/7 phone support. OFX’s parent company, OFX Group Limited is listed on the Australian Stock Exchange. OFX’s platform enables simple, fast and secure borderless payments and the capability to speak to OFX representatives 24/7 no matter where you are in the world. Operational since 1998, we have managed over 5 million transfers, totalling in excess of AUD$125 billion.
OFX offers two core products, Global FX Payments and Global Currency Account (GCA).
Global FX Payments:
Global Payments is our standard international money transfer, transferring money from one global currency to another. Customers can make a Global Payment via OFX’s Website, App and also calling the call centre.
Global Currency Account:
Global Currency Account is an Accounts Receivable product enabling customers to receive funds in multiple currencies into a virtual bank account and manage their money using the OFX platform paying either themselves or third-party suppliers. All payments are made using OFX’s Global Payments technology. GCA is predominately used by Online Sellers, selling through platforms such as Amazon, eBay etc and is managed through OFX’s website.
In a highly regulated industry (I believe) there is a perception that you are either unable to innovate or innovation is incredibly slow due to Compliance or other Regulatory reasons.
However, this is not necessarily the case. I believe that there is a lot of opportunity to work “within the framework” that enables your business to be quite nimble and innovative in this space.
In this talk I will discuss an example of how we looked at a problem at OFX and what we have done to solve this problem, evolve how we as a business look at our customer problems and where we will look for further improvements in the future.
Let’s start with our problem statement – How do we improve our registration process for our corporate customer base?
Where are the pain points for our customers in the registration process?
How long does it take for our customers to register?
What are the metrics we want to review – customer drop off rate, time to complete registration, how long does it take to be approved and ready to transact?
First things first:
What is the User Journey ? – this was created by our UX team and it was our starting point to look at where/what we could improve.
This is where we started our discussions with all business departments (including Compliance) – what notifications need to be sent out vs what is actually being sent out. Do we need to ask question A at point X or can we move that question to a better more logical place later (or earlier) in the process.
After the user journey was completed we then took the opportunity to run a Google Design Sprint on the registration process.
For those who have not experienced a Design Sprint – It is an intensive process run over 5 days that aims to work quickly to get a validated solution to a complex business problem. OFX had never tried this methodology or looked at a customer problem in this way before. It was a perfect opportunity to try something different and to bring together a number of business groups that are not normally working together to drive a new customer experience.
Why did we try this?
My goal is to help evolve how we do things at OFX and now we had the perfect project to start to Change the culture of how we look at problems.
We wanted to save time and money – and get something in front of an audience to validate as soon as possible
We want to reduce our product development cycle
We need to measure real feedback – learn and move on from this quickly
For our Product group this was the right time to try this change.
How did we approach the Sprint?
The facilitators were the UX team. We brought together business representatives from all parts of the business. Being a global company - the main business stakeholder was the head of the North America region. A room for the week was held. Diaries were cleared for a core group of people made up of – UX / Design, Product, Engineering, and then further groups were pulled into sessions depending on the day and the tasks that needed to be performed.
First things – understanding the problem.
What were the main customer problems?
Customers felt there was a lack of information upfront about what is needed to setup an account ready to transfer money.
Customers told us that we had poor communication and we provided only a limited ability to track progress of the registration process
Customers felt there was too much effort to register, which, combined with the lack of information and poor communication led to customer frustration with the entire process
What were the business problems?
OFX did not have a standard way to track the process internally and the hand over between teams meant customer information could be misplaced or slow to be actioned
We were unhappy with the time it took to onboard and have a corporate client ready to transact.
Setting up a GCA account takes time, and most information was sent through via email which was difficult to track and keep on top of
There is too much manual effort internally dealing with registrations – it is hard to scale up resources to deal with bulk registrations
Quite different processes have evolved in the global offices which lead to inconsistencies and delays to process registrations
This meant there was actually a lot of opportunity to improve things!
Next we defined the problem statement – “Lucy” from company.inc has an immediate need to transfer money. She wants to set up a relationship so she can focus on her business and not worry about her FX needs.
Taking this into account our new customer experience we wanted to fit within our guiding UX and Design principles:
It has to be Quick
It has to be Clear and
It has to be Easy
We also worked on a customer value proposition based on :
The Corporate customer comes to OFX to make a transfer or receive funds quickly at the best rates.
Customer Pains – There are too many channels and manual effort to set up a business account
Customer Gains (where is The Value) – The customer saves money and is able to talk directly to a dealer if there are any questions that need answering
This all helped with our target customer journey.
The key outcomes being:
An automated Electronic Verification (EV) process
Alignment of business teams to be on the same path and also working in tandem with the customer throughout the journey
Improved digital EV and KYC compliance needs met
We validated our Ideas with customers around the globe.
Running feedback sessions in AU, US + CA
What worked well:
Running a Design sprint gave us a quick process from defining a problem to validating a solution in a short time frame
We took the opportunity to look at what our competitors are doing as well as looking at examples from other business industries as a team (this had previously been done in isolation if at all). A great change for OFX.
Involving stakeholders with different levels of expertise across the business and including from different regions to ideate together, helped to get buy in on ideas. Also some team members found it challenging to draw and transform their ideas into an interface but the collaborative format allowed for diverse ideas and various perspectives.
Involving global stakeholders and developers throughout the process (would like to point out a couple of video links in these photos where people joined us from different regions around the world.) had not been done before and this helped to generate some buzz around this initiative.
Validating and getting customer feedback early in the process helped to eliminate assumptions and we adjusted quickly to evolve the end state experience.
What did we learn from the experience?
We had a lot of interest in this Design sprint as it was new, and different, and exciting. This interest in a new project was quite different to previous project kick off events where participation from other business groups was sketchy at best.
We selected a core team of 8 people to run this initiative. This was the first time OFX ran this methodology so we brought the core team together based off their previous experience of participating in a Design sprint elsewhere and people that worked directly on the existing registration process. The number of participants grew to 20 for certain exercises like target journey mapping & internal feedback sessions.
Although we at OFX like to think we are customer focused this method highlighted how not everyone internally is *actually* keeping the customer at the center of their thinking. Here is a quote from a participant prior to the event :
“I have a certain work process and prefer to solve a problem to cater to my way of working” (not exactly a customer first approach), however, after participating in this Design Sprint this same participant came around to say:
“I have a new appreciation on how we can work as a team to solve our customer’s problems”.
This process also helped the wider business participants to gain experience of the various market challenges that influence our regional offices. When you work in one place you don’t always get the opportunity to understand how different markets and processes evolve which then impacts how your customers interact with your products or service.
Ideation is sometimes daunting & very intimidating – Some team members from other parts of the business were out of their comfort zone when they had to bring their ideas to life & present to the team. The UX team worked hard to reassure everyone that there are no bad ideas, being uncomfortable is fine – it is all part of the journey.
Including regional & remote stakeholders is challenging
It is very difficult to make them feel included during white board sessions. We all had to work outside of our normal work hours at times, especially to participate in important sessions and to avoid designing in isolation.
We scheduled our agenda to fit the key sessions around regional stakeholders working hours. This was not a 9am to 5pm week of work.
It was a very successful process on a number of levels.
We started with a bunch of customer & internal business process problems & ended up with a validated solution in just 5 days.
We went from completion of design sprint to final designs ready for build in 2.5 weeks.
This process forced teams to think differently. We really brought the “corporate customer” to the centre of our thinking. This resulted in our business process evolving around them and how we could be more efficient as a business to serve this customer segment. We even managed to challenge the heavy compliance process to improve the customer experience.
There has been a change in attitude and culture. After the groups had been brought together there has been follow up discussions across what was previously business divides. Walls have been broken down and a new appreciation of what different business groups do has been achieved. Regional offices seem more connected (at least for now).
However, there is also an appreciation that this is a work in progress. Yes - we managed to achieve a lot of our internal goals but this was just one small project and it was our first efforts of working differently. This was a great project to pick up some internal momentum of change, but I do not want to see this being the only internal effort of change. We have a lot of room at OFX to continue to change and evolve our processes to bring better products and services to life for our customers.
Even better news: We are well into development and we will have an updated registration process for our corporate customers live very soon. Thanks to this process we already know that we are building an experience that is Quick, it is Clear and much Easier for our customers to complete than what we currently have live. This improvement cant come soon enough.
So what will we do differently next time?
We will start the ideation process earlier. Bringing it forward to day 2 will help as this was a really positive process but due to people learning how to do this we took longer than expected on this. We will also look to remove the target journey story mapping exercise as part of the design sprint. We didn’t find this as valuable as the ideation phase and really getting into the iterative feedback loop of the design process. The story mapping exercise can be run later.
Take more breaks – and get more food. It is an intense 5 days and keeping everyone hydrated and tummies filled helps to keep the positive energies up. We really noticed people starting to flag in the later half of the week. Breaking up the day in a better way will help with this. We also think that doing this exercise more often will actually help as people get more used to working like this.
We need to be more prepared to help be more productive. Rather than filling an 8 hour day we will look to cut down the day to 6 or so hours to allow extra “homework” sessions. This will also allow for further research and optimization options to be considered.
To help bring more internal people along for the journey we need to look at how we set up our teams. We will partner 1st timers with more experienced people, particularly during the ideation session to make the process less daunting.
Although we had senior stakeholders contribute – I would like to see much further engagement from senior management, particularly during the “Ideas presentation and voting sessions”. This will definitely help with the cultural change and also enables management to see first hand and appreciate how ideas evolve over time and the number of different iterations that were considered and discussed.
During the prototype phase not all of the core team worked with the UX and design group closely enough. It was felt that this was “their” task to do, but it’s a team event and the team should bring to life the customer experience. We will look to make this prototyping much more integrated with the entire team contributing.
We need to appreciate the global nature of our business as this causes problems that need to be solved locally in their own unique way. We will narrow down a customer segment to 1 region. Then deliver at least 2 radical prototypes to test for that region, rather than prototyping and attempting to cater for nuances of 3 regions in only 2 days with limited resources.
Finally – I would love to make it much better for remote people to feel more involved. We need to look at better technology to facilitate online whiteboarding sessions to bring remote teams together and make this team exercise feel more together. We used video conferencing and sharing screens etc but I would really love to get something like this moving iPad machine, but I just don’t know if our CFO will actually sign off on one of these… In the mean time we will just have to continue to manually move the conference camera around to “look at the wall”.
Thank you for your time. You can find my details here – please feel free to drop me a note if you have any questions about what I have talked about today.