Case study: Designing A sales tool for relationship managers of a bank (Axis SBB)
We were approached by a key player in the Indian banking space in India with a requirement to merge their various tools and streamline their employee’s workflow.
Design Brief
A solution should help increase the sales team productivity through the real-time decision making and information access, by allowing the user to:
- Track portfolio and update visits/ leads on-the-go
- Retrieve relevant customer info when needed
- Provide a transparent view of the portfolio and daily activities of their reports to the supervisors
- Provision to verify using geotagging to check whether the RM(Relationship Manager )really visited the location or not.
User & Audiences
- Relationship managers: their daily agenda included calling & visiting new & problematic customers and keep them on par with required behavior.
- Sales managers: they pursue a lead, market the product, convert the lead into a customer, collecting required documents, and doing the initial onboarding.
Roles & responsibilities & duration of the project
I handled the project under the guidance of a UX strategist.
I was on-boarded onto the project after the Research phase and was handed the business requirement document(BRD) & Detailed features list. The previous designer work on the
My responsibility was to handle client interaction, Understand business goals & User goals, reporting to senior & project managers, brainstorming, and converting BRDs into high fidelity wireframes.
Duration: 4 months
Scopes & constraints
Constraints
- The backend of the bank system should support the designs created.
- The solution is required to be developed in a modular manner keeping in mind future additions.
- The client had a third-party backend team, whom I needed to get my designs reviewed to understand their and coding languages UI limitations.
Process
Understanding the BRDs
I got a knowledge transfer from the teammate in 3 days, along with a presentation about what the product does, what issues they faced and how are we going to tackle them. Next week I drowned myself in those documents understanding what the client is expecting from me, banking terms used.
Also met an end-user and saw what kind of environment she works in, the current system they use, and cleared my doubts(Was a really helpful exercise). she was my go-to person to get updated content and clarifications in the future.
Understanding the users
The front-line employees update their daily targets on a physical huddle board every morning. They access CRM on their desktop to update lead status, a customer visit, or a branch visit. They refer to other portals to track the health of their portfolio or look up information about a specific customer.
Understanding the user’s journey
Currently, the software system was only desktop-based so the RM used to take printed forms to the bank customers, fill them at the site and then again fill them up after getting back to the office. Hence making the task redundant. Also, customers were asked to mail the documents and then RM was uploading them on the portal online form & document upload will solve that issue.
Research by the client also concluded that there’s a need for an app to have a backup of daily calls & visits offline so it wouldn’t hinder the work at weak network areas.
Wireframing
The design direction was based on Google’s drive website and app design. It’s scalable, known to target users.
I was presented with mobile and web wireframes of home pages on which i had to add & inspire for the rest of similar and unique pages.
My job then was to make high-fidelity wireframes based on the requirements and updates. Also, Brainstorm and conceptualize any new screen needed based on the current design direction.
Also admin side wireframes were also created to make changes,add, delete various contents.
UI dark theme proposal
During one of the meetings I got to know about the call center role of RMs where they just sit, call the customers to get issues addressed, or schedule a visit.
As the UI direction was light themed and would add strain on eyes for longer watch periods. I thought of making a dark theme version of the main page. And approached the client so we could test out with call center users or have a light and dark theme switch on the website. Unfortunately, it was struck down due to a funny reason. We went ahead with the light theme.
I took inspiration from twitter’s dark theme color pallete and got help from the UI designer on tweaking the colors. It was a fun experiment.
Outcomes & Lessons
- I learned how to effectively handle clients and get the point across
- Mailing the minutes of the meetings to have proof of the changes requested & issues resolved keeps everyone in the loop and is the most important practice.
- A UX 101 workshop establishing what the client’s role is?, what is UX, and its process, would have helped smooth workflow.
- Being in touch with the users helped me get quick info/feedback on my work.
- I learned how to ask for proper feedback (Hint: It's not “Do you like it?”)
- Frequent feedback from the client’s developers helped add/remove the elements due to various constraints.
- Documenting feedback, issues. Being a bridge between the client-side mobile development team and web backend team & our in-house front end team Also keeping everyone updated on the email thread helped me and other teams have more clarity.
Future Improvements
A simple feedback /feature request system could be added for the improvement of the product, hence completing the loop of the process which could help in future developments.
Improving backend systems would help support better design solutions because the current system updates the data after 2 days, need to reduce that asap.
Feature pushed of next phase: Creating a customer-side app/website could streamline the process of document renewal, verification, upload, and a customer would have a good overview of their transactions and issues that may come up. This essentially reduces the RM’s intervention with the customers.
