Fortune 50 Financial Institution (2021)
Consumer Collections:
Taking a human-centered approach to transform consumer collections
Background and Objectives
Wells Fargo sought to explore and understand consumers who have been, or are currently dealing with debt delinquency and collections in order to generate empathy and resulting strategies to further engage this segment.
With the onset of COVID, and so many of our customers experiencing financial hardship, we saw a tremendous opportunity to step in and assist these customers at such a vulnerable time in their lives. Not only would this proposed digital product offer huge benefits to our customers, but also allow us to build stronger relationships, reduce employee strain, and generate additional revenue for multiple Lines of Business (LOB).
Some things we wanted to better understand:
- What is the right consumer vernacular with which to communicate with these consumers?
- What was their overall financial journey to arrive at this point?
- What life circumstances create financial barriers to paying down debt?
- What do consumers prioritize when paying down debt?
- What does their ideal financial future state look like?
- What are their financial aspirations and how could a financial institution serve them?
How would this work impact the organization:
- Create a customer-centric, self-service digital collections experience (more control and freedom for customers)
- Reduced call load on contact centers (reduced employee burn-out, shorter call wait times)
- Keeping debt in-house, rather than transferring to third party (maintain customer relationships, improved brand image)
- Expected $XXX in additional annual revenue (cannot disclose this figure as this is private company information)
Discover
Interviews
As this was a completely new approach to the Collections space for us, we started by completing some initial data analyses, stakeholder interviews, and support call monitoring. We then determined exploratory interviews with people who have, have had, or anticipate having a delinquent account on credit cards, student loans, and/or personal debt would be the best approach.
A total of 12 individual, 60-minute, nationwide interviews were conducted through UserTesting.com
Participant selection criteria:
- Mix of times in and out of deliquencies
- Mix of days delinquent and amount delinquent on
- Mix of Wells Fargo and competitor customers
- Mix of those who have had their debt transferred to 3rd party collection agency and those who have not
- Mix of age, gender, income level, education level, ethnicity, and geographic location
A few quotes from our interviewees:
Test
Usability
We felt that this is one of the most important phases of this research program. These customers would not have the assistance of a customer service agent as they would if they had called in. We needed to build an extremely well-designed, user-centered product. As such, we chose to approach it from multiple angles to gather the most impactful and actionable insights available.
A few of the methods and KPI's we chose:
- Qualitative and quantitative usability testing; moderated and unmoderated
- Statistically compared designs through Balanced Comparison (A/B); measuring task completion times, error rates, conversion rates, etc.
- Will continue tracking usability over time; types of support issues, NPS, support call monitoring, error rates, and search log analyses
- Currently working on benchmarking for MVP so we have these data when adding/refining features for post-MVP
- Monitoring social media accounts for kudos or complaints
Some of the feedback we received from our testing:
Listen
Key Findings
- Debt is heavily tied to emotion. The more understanding, caring, compassionate, and willing to work with an individual an institution is, the higher the priority to pay the institution
- Prioritized debts to repay based on logical (smallest balances first, debt with biggest consequences first, highest interest rates first) and emotional factors (most likely to show empathy/care about me, most likely to "work" with me, least "greedy" and heavy on fees)
- On the flip side, poor treatment disincentives repayment
Recommendations
- Offer customers as much digital control and freedom as possible by allowing them to make payment arrangements, choose repayment plans, determine qualification, and use Chat option, all in-app
- Be flexible; a few solutions could be time extensions, fixed monthly payments, reduced or fixed interest rates, and a pay-what-they-can program. And the ability to qualify/initiate through the digital channel
- Content plays a large role in this product; empathetic, informal language allows the customer to understand we are not blaming them and relate to their unique situation
