What you need to know:

• Australia's banking sector is going backward, and this year received its worst Forrester CX Index score since the start of the decade.
• CX is also failing to provide a significant competitive advantage.
• To address the issue, NAB brought in a new head of design, Lance Thornwood two years ago, and he has spent that time looking at how to make working with the bank simpler, faster, and easier for customers.
• His recipe? Design from a genuine customer perspective and build safety and security in from the get-go.
• And be prepared to have long discussions with a conga line of stakeholders across the enterprise. Because in design, as in marketing, every parrot at the petshop has an opinion they want to share.

To build better customer experiences, put the customer at the centre of your thinking, and don't assume that you (or worse your executives) know best. And build safety and security in from the start. If you do that, and also remember that design is not about how things look but how they work, then you have a fighting chance of giving customers simpler and faster experiences.

Lance Thornswood is now two years into his stint at NAB as chief design officer. He says he joined at a time that the bank was looking closely at its digital strategy. He said of his appointment, "It was really a recognition that we needed to bring design fully to the table and fully into the mix as part of the way that we approach customer experience.”

He told delegates to the recent Forrester CX conference, "If you do these things, and if you really approach with a slightly different mindset, what you'll find is that you can keep customers safer, you can keep them more secure, you can make things simpler, and you can speed things up. And those things all seem kind of inherently at odds with one another, but by really approaching this in a smart, customer-centric way, it's actually possible to achieve all of those things."

Australia's banks have been hoeing a hard row in customer experience this decade.

According to Forrester's annual Customer Experience Index: "In the banking industry, the average score was the lowest since 2020, with ING and Bendigo leading the industry as the only banks in the 'good' category of CX."

That same study said of NAB's performance that it flatlined, which sadly in relative terms looks like a win.

Across its banking peers, Forrester also noted CX was not proving to be a differentiator. "The Big Four banks — ANZ, CommBank, National Australia Bank (NAB), and Westpac — are separated by a scant 8.9 points. This indicates that there’s little difference in banks’ ability to drive loyalty with quality CX."

But if Thornswood and his team can move the dial, there are wins to be had, at least based on the experience of ING, and Bendigo and Adelaide Bank.

The report notes those two banks "Enjoy a lead of more than 6 points over third-place CommBank. So it’s no surprise that ING and Bendigo are among the highest in retention, enrichment, and advocacy loyalty: 83 per cent of ING customers plan to stay with the bank, 69 per cent plan to spend more with it, and 68 per cent plan to advocate for the bank."

Change takes time, and it also frequently requires a change in perspective.

"It's incredibly important that rather than thinking kind of in our own minds what we think we need to build, we need to really focus on what is it that the customer needs us to solve for them," said Thornswood. "They may seem like a little thing, but ... remember we're not the customer. We may be customers of our own companies – hopefully, we all are – but we inherently know too much to effectively be a proxy for that customer."

He also voiced the long-felt frustration of designers everywhere when telling delegates, "Remember that design is not how things look. It's fundamentally how things work."

Per Thornswood, "From our perspective at NAB, we think that it's incredibly important that we really think about not just the product that we're building, not just the functionality, not just how things are going to look on the screen, but that entire value-stream, and that's really the way that we approach keeping our customers safe and secure."

He also gave three examples of the business impact of design, the first was tackling the issue of spam scams, the second involved eliminating risk when customers were buying new products, and the third involved redesigning how information is sent to customers that doesn’t overwhelm them.

Can the spam

Spam is a rampant problem everywhere in the world, said Thornswood, "It's a massive problem in banking, especially here – Australia is one of the most attacked countries in the world in terms of cyber and in the banking industry. That gives us the heebie jeebies, because that means that we're in a spot where customers are at risk."

With customers being bombarded with scam span, NAB decided to remove clickable links from text messages.

"This seems like an easy thing to solve, right? And on the surface, that is actually pretty easy."  

The devil, as always, is in the detail, and there are a lot of people in a bank, with a lot of details to address.

"We had to get lined up with marketing, with CX, with digital business, with tech, and with all of the banking products as well."

That's because taking the links out meant driving some really significant internal change he said.

"So we need everybody aligned. We needed to make sure that then customers were aware that if they received a message purporting to be from NAB, and it had a link in it, that they should immediately be suspicious, and they should immediately recognise that that's not from NAB. That's a really significant change."

Per Thornswood, "We had to really rethink all of our strategies around customer communication, around in-app messaging, around push notification, and then ultimately, we really needed to just rewire the mindset of the whole organisation in order to allow us to do that."

The change went through 10 months ago and he says the new approach has been well received. He said the story illustrates the importance of getting all of the aspects of the organisation aligned.

Think-shift

His second example demonstrates how the design team was able to help eliminate some of the risks the bank faces in a highly regulated environment where customers often provide incomplete information.

"We took a we took a design lens to this problem, and we said, what is the underlying customer problem here that we're really trying to solve."

The team recognised that the bank was still designing with an eight-year old laptop computer mindset, instead of recognising the primacy of smart phones.

"We were still thinking of full-size keyboards, easy, cut and paste, all of that sort of thing. We needed to shift in a major way, how we thought about the customer interaction. We also really needed to wise up about asking for information. Do we already have it or if we could infer it."

Bottom line: "Don't ask someone to type something in that you can easily get from all of the data that we already have. Let's instead display that information and just ask them to change it only if it only if it's incorrect."

"We also needed to make our our whole form interaction much smarter and much easier and that again came down to shifting the organisational mindset that previously though, 'If we need a piece of information, put a little box on the page, let the customer fill that in. We're good.'

This second example demonstrates why it is important to think about the customer problem in advance.

Undercut the overload

The final problem he outlined involved NAB addressing potential information overload. "When dealing with fraud we were sending all this information out to customers at a time when they are already all overloaded. If it's not relevant, you're not going to read it. Even if you do read it, you're not going to remember it, if it's not relevant in the moment."

According to Thornswood, NAB took advantage of machine learning and AI models to identify likely fraudulent patterns in each customer's set of digital interactions with the bank.

"We were able to identify a series of fingerprints. What is the likely set of circumstances that you might see in a customer's transaction history or other interaction, digital interactions that leads to a high propensity that this might be a fraud or a scam situation."

"When we see that the customer behaviour stream is starting to form one of these scam or fraud fingerprint patterns, then and only then do we put up a message."

Just as important the customer gets the message at the moment that it's needed.

"This is a good example of how incorporating the machine learning models and helping to create more customer safety and security is fuelled by some very simple things, " he said.

Simple. Fast. Easy... Apparently.