A workflow tool that facilitates communication between frontline employees and support specialists in order to deliver efficient and empathetic services to customers while meeting legal and business requirements.
As a consultant, I worked with cross-functional partners from one of the top 5 Canadian banks. The current process at the bank is done with a 30-year-old software, using a generic service request that is not optimized for the specific task of deceased and estate settlement.
In order to settle a case, there needs to be a three-way conversation between the banker, customer and support specialist. A generic service request within the in-branch internal service application is used to communicate case details as seen in the screenshot below.
The reliance on the generic service request makes it difficult to communicate in a timely manner. Often, the request gets buried under other types of requests and forgotten over time. This leads to significant delays and mistakes that have serious legal consequences. Our solution aims to bridge that communication gap.
A screenshot of the generic service request originally used
The biggest challenge of the project was understanding the business process and getting different stakeholders to agree on the way forward.
While there are policies in place for estate and deceased cases, there were different variations to how things were executed and processes that are still in flux and subject to policy changes. To understand the current state, I conducted stakeholder interviews, consulted policy documents, and reviewed existing designs. Then, I created a service blueprint based on all the information I collected, and reviewed it together with the stakeholders.
Current state service blueprint
By creating the service blueprint, the biggest pain points were surfaced. This helped to guide the direction of the design explorations and decisions to be made.
Bankers and support specialists have no one source of truth for determining what the next steps are, leaving room for speculation and errors.
The service request often gets buried under all kinds of other requests, resulting in significant delays.
No easy way to track the status of the service requests once it is sent. The sender has to manually look up the case number if the receiver does not respond.
With the help of business stakeholders, we identified the key metrics for success.
The life cycle of a case, from when it is created to case closure, is a key measure for internal staff performance. Reducing friction in communication between different roles involved is key to improving efficiencies.
Irregularities that arise from audits create huge risks for the bank. If we made the rules more explicit and easier to follow, and make cases more traceable and better documented, we can reduce risks of irregularities.
By making the administrative and legal process easier to execute, we can make space for the branch employees to be fully present with clients experiencing the death of loved ones.
After a case is created, the next steps are broken down into guided sections. At each step, relevant questions are introduced to lead the employees into taking appropriate actions based on responses to the questions. This helps employees remember what needs to be asked or collected from the customer and presents information in a more digestible way.
Examples of how the steps are broken down within each section
Throughout the handling of a case, there are multiple times when a case would be handed over to an employee of a different role. To ensure a smooth transition, the Overview page is introduced for a quick way to understand the background of a case. In addition, employees can add comments relating to a specific case scenario in the Notes section.
At any point in the life cycle of a case, anyone should be able to reassign the case to another employee if needed. The act of reassigning triggers an email notification to the assignee, prompting the employee to act. This also accommodates for instances where an employee goes on vacation or leaves the bank.
On top of feedback from the users, I also conducted design critique sessions with design teams, and consulted the design system and accessibility experts to ensure the designs are up to standard. Below is an example of design explorations made based on feedback from these design critiques.
Version 1: Having the steps nested within the left navigation panel
Version 2: A mini dashboard within one page, condensing multiple stages into one with the use of takeover screens for a more focused view of each section
Version 3: A Kanban style board within the takeover flow
While I invited tech representatives to all the design meetings throughout the project, there had been lots of changes to resources and different people coming in and out of the project. To keep everyone aligned, I shared recordings of walkthrough videos and kept a source of truth with links to specific screens in Figma (as seen in the screenshot above).
A process map with links to specific Figma screens to help new dev and QA folks navigate the designs.
If we can implement file uploading on the dashboard, the employees can directly upload the required documents and have it verified automatically, all in one platform. This would drastically increase the value the tool can bring to employees, reducing the effort of navigating between different platforms, and therefore reduce the time needed to process a case.
For roles such as the managers and auditors, the use cases and needs are quite different from that of power users (front-line employees who handle the day-to-day operations). A more robust filter system, and features such as bulk assign would be huge timesavers for these users.
If employees can directly tag the people they want to mention in Notes, and have a notification sent to the person mentioned automatically, this would make communication much smoother and reduce the delay when a case switches hands between different roles.
