Pended Application CX Research
& Business Case Development

Led pended application business case and roadmap creation by co-creating journey maps with the contact center, stakeholders, and customers, resulting in funding for asynchronous chat technology integration and implementation of prioritized CX recommendations.

Business Problem

Around 30% of applications for a new bank accounts were being held for review to check for fraud because we couldn’t confirm user identities.

This high number of pended applications, was causing a strain on our operations team, who would manually review each application and reach back out to the customer for documentation.

Customer Problem

Many users were confused about the status of their application, what was needed for the application to go through, and when they would be contacted to finish the process, which led to many calls to the call center for information.

Objective

Understand the issues both customers and call center associates were experiencing when applications failed to create a business case for funding.

Process

Journey Mapping
We started the process by journey mapping the experience with our business partner, utilizing her knowledge of the customer experience, call center implications, and underlying systems involved to create a base understanding of what was happening and why all these people were in a pended application status. As we journey mapped we identified many obvious pain points and underlying business challenges we would need to overcome. Users could easily get lost in the customer identification process, document upload process and status tracking process. The path to resolution was not clear and we had to remedy the issue within a short time period in order to keep customer interest.

Data & Analytics
Once we felt good about the level of detail within our journey maps, we reached out to our data and analytics partners to see if they could quantify the impact of issues we had identified. Once we dug in to the numbers we found that pended application customers had to wait an average of 3.5 days before someone contacted them about their pending application! The number of calls to understand pended application status within those 3.5 days was drowning the call center with calls that they were unable resolve because they lacked the information they needed about status.

Voice of the Customer
Next, we looked through the voice of the customer comments. The level of frustration we were seeing within the comments was painful.

After combing through countless comments, we learned customers were most frustrated with customer ID questions, uploading documents to prove their identity and reaching out for answers about the status of their pended application, but not being able to get any answers from chat or the call center.

Customer Interviews
Next we conducted a set of interviews to make sure what we were capturing within the journey maps reflected reality and matched the true emotion of actual customers. We talked to two audiences, those that were eventually able to open the account that pended and those that were not. I don’t think I’ve done a set of interviews where customers were so frustrated. The interviews confirmed our hypotheses that we needed to do a better job communicating status of pending applications, make document upload easier, and ensure that the contact center had all the data they needed to update customers on their status, no matter the channel.

Ideation & Prioritization Workshop
After the interviews, we met with some of the stakeholders at the call center to ideate on possible opportunities. This was an all day session where we thought through possible solutions for each of our main scenarios and prioritized the ideas created based on customer impact, feasibility, and viability. Then we took the ideas that were identified as providing the most impact and created a storyboard for each, that was eventually integrated into the final business case to showcase the benefit to the customer and the business.

Business Case Development
Once we had a good understanding of the pain points, opportunities, data, voice of the customer and vision, we started crafting the business case to take to leadership for funding. Using the data we collected it didn’t take long to create a story around the benefits to both the business and the customer. It was clear that this issue needed attention and funding to be resolved.

Outcome

The project received funding for new asynchronous chat technology integration and prioritized recommendations were added to the product roadmap. I’m unsure the numerical outcome, but we did reduce the number of pended applications, calls to the call center and negative VOC around pended applications..