No Surprises

SERVICE DESIGN, LEADERSHIP, PRODUCT DESIGN

Head of User Experience, IRESS Ltd

October 2013 - October 2018

Background

XPLAN is a complete and comprehensive financial planning and wealth management software solution produced by Iress. It is sold to large organisations and also small independent advisor offices. When you buy Xplan, an Iress team helps you implement the software inside your business.

The challenge

The Managed Services team in Warwick handles UK standard Xplan implementations. To meet 2018 financial targets the UK Managed Services team have been set an Xplan implementation target of 18 clients per month from their current average of 4 clients. Although individual clients tend to be small in scale, in total they account for a large global revenue source. In short, they matter.

The implementation team are a fantastic example of an Iress team – positive, proactive and customer-focused. No-one understands why impementations are taking so long.

The UK-based design team was asked to look at the challenge by applying a design thinking approach. How can we scale wealth implementations?

Approach

We were allocated a meeting room in the Warwick office which we turned into an informal project space. We put comms out inviting anyone in the business to come by and talk about their experiences or ideas.

We ran sessions with the implementation team, sales, training and client services.

We documented the 'as is' process from first contact with a new client right through to supporting them as an established Xplan user.

Some teams record individual's effort via a timesheet system. We were given access to this and additional team data to help us analyse what was going on.

We spoke to a lot of clients, some established and some going through the implementations process. Some clients were happy and some were really unhappy. We captured all their experiences across the entire customer experience journey.

Clear themes started to emerge.

Identifying themes

Looking at the research and other data, we could see clear patterns which we categorised as the following 'surprises':

Clients didn't understand the product.

clients were surprised at the complexity of the software and the effort required to use it.

Clients didn't understand the engagement required of them in the process.

we didn't clearly explain how the implementation process will unfold and what they will need to do along the way.

Clients don't know who to contact as the process unfolds.

Clients tend to call whoever they have bonded with at Iress, regardless of the nature of their query.

We also identified some key internal challenges:

We didn't understand our own proposition
Work done by the sales team isn't effectively captured and communicated further down the process
We use too many systems, duplicate effort and lose sight of high value activities

Design the Box

Looking across the themes, I thought creating a physical representation of Xplan might help us understand it, and also help us present it clearly to prospective clients in marketing, sales, or training contexts. Something tangible and simple would help us talk about many of the issues raised in the research.

I chose a Gamestorming activity called Design the Box from the excellent book by Dave Gray and Sunni Brown. This exercise is fun, creative and collaborative. It gets people out of their seats and screens, away from detailed design discussions, and focuses them on understanding core product messaging.

The box is an important part of what leads us to purchase a product. It tells a story, emphasises its own benefits and uses visuals and typography to present itself.

We set out to imagine what Xplan packaging might look like. How could we describe it simply so people understood what it was, what it did, who it was for and why they should buy it? It should also be clear about what requirements there would be of them.

Additional work was happening around role definition and governance, and awareness of others' roles and responsibilities. We looked at the number of systems teams used throughout the process and the activities we spent time on. Ultimately, we needed a clearly defined, repeatable and effective process that all implementations could follow.

Results

Taking the outputs from the various workshops, we came up with a set of boxes that described the 3 main flavours of Xplan. We also created a "No Surprises" pamphlet that would be inside the box and provide further information to the client.

I priced up a quick experiment we could run across regions where we could get feedback from internal teams and clients.

Impact

Xplan implementations in 2018 and 2019 contributed to Iress hitting financial targets. The number of implementations rose, not to the target of 18 a month, but the process of implementing Xplan was much more efficient so there was less overhead in each project.

Customers were much better informed ahead of implementations and understood what was expected of them in the process. Advocacy and satisfaction rose and support reduced drastically.

Iress has continued to refine the idea and today offer 3 clear, simple versions of the product. The product box and pamphlet are still in use in the early stages of projects.