Better online banking for corporate customers—

PNC Bank’s Corporate and Institutional Banking line of business tasked our MHCI team with designing interventions to their online banking tool PINACLE that will support their clients in performing essential tasks and troubleshooting problems.

The Treasury Management Division within the PNC Bank Corporate and Institutional Banking (C&IB) line of business offers a comprehensive suite of financial solutions for businesses and organizations throughout the U.S. and internationally. PNC C&IB uses high-quality customer services to establish a relationship-based banking model, differentiate itself from competitors and establish competitive position. PNC clients use online and mobile banking portal PINACLE® to provide direct client access to C&IB’s products.

PROBLEM SPACE

Treasury Management Client Care (TMCC) representatives provide support to clients with inquiries on how to use services within the portal as well as general inquiries related to their account activity, amounting to roughly 7,000 client calls per month. PNC tasked our team with application of human-centered design methods to identify opportunities for improvement in a redesigned PINACLE user experience.

When we began our capstone project, PNC had already begun the design-research process of redesigning PINACLE; our work could be complementary to the new platform, the old one, or, perhaps, both.

Our initial research focused on a seemingly simple goal: how might we improve the online banking experience for commercial banking customers?

PINACLE users are a diverse group, as are their needs and behaviors, and the tool should support users of all abilities.

Interviewed financial professionals varied in terms of responsibilities, department structures, tech savviness, and attitudes toward security.

Length of call "depends on how competent the client is." Some clients can follow directions well, but others need click-by-click instructions.

PINACLE users are overwhelmed by the number of features.

Most of the interviewed PINACLE users make very limited use of the tool, and feel intimidated by features that go unused. They do not make time for exploration of new features or help documentation.

“Sales representatives sell small companies products more complicated than they need.”

PINACLE users are not proactive in their learning and instead react when they encounter challenges.

PINACLE users don’t know about the Help and Training resources that are currently available on the platform, or they don’t want to use them because of how unwieldy they perceive them.

“I think that most of the time, client issues could be resolved through the [PINACLE] Help and Training module.”

Time is relative for both clients and TMCC representatives.

Some banking clients perceive calling TMCC to solve a problem as faster than troubleshooting it themselves; others devise elaborate workarounds to get PINACLE to perform the way they need it too. And TMCC reps often spend long chunks of time on the phone guiding clients click-by-click through problem resolutions.

28% of PINACLE-related calls are about passwords.
-- Data from Aug 2018-Feb 2019

We conducted interviews with 10+ financial professionals who use PINACLE about their online banking experiences.

We also interviewed TMCC representatives about their day-to-day experiences handling client calls about PINACLE. This helped us enrich our understanding of the quantitative call long data.

We analyzed and synthesized call log data from PNC’s Treasury Management Client Care (TMCC), identifying the most called-about issues.

PNC staff members walked us through the current PINACLE portal, as well as through a demo of the redesign.

Financial professionals work with a variety of software in their day-to-day work, and we explored out how these tools interface with each other.

Over the course of our research process, we have synthesized our findings and insights into resources that we reference in our ideation and design.

In order to better understand the system our challenge is grounded within, we built a concept map as a synthesis of the information we collected during calls with our clients.

We built personas based on the data that we gathered from both our service providers and our users. We referenced these personas throughout our process to help us understand our stakeholders’ needs, experiences, and goals. In our iterative design work process, we have revisited these and revised them in response to feedback and new findings in order for us to best understand who we are designing for.

We mapped the various pain points that PINACLE clients and TMCC representatives experience through journey maps in order to form an aligned mental model of the problem space, as well as to communicate our understanding to our clients and advisors.

This process helped us identify a demonstrable gap in our own data: comparing interviews with PINACLE users to the qualitative and quantitative data from TMCC revealed a mismatch; most of our PINACLE user interviewees reported that they do not call TMCC often, if ever, despite the massive call volume from users in their peer group. The customer stakeholders that we have been able to access report fairly high levels of comfort in using technology; their experiences may not entirely reflect the realities of PINACLE users who are frequent callers. This is a gap we hope to close as we move forward in evaluative research of our prototypes.

We built an affinity diagram to organize our data points from interviews with financial professionals in able to draw out insights. We also augmented the diagram by adding in data points from our interviews with TMCC representatives in a different color to corresponding groups we already formed. It was interesting to see that some of the insights from PINACLE users were validated by client care team, while others were challenged.

After we completed our generative research, we moved on to putting our findings to use through ideation around improved PINACLE experience and validation of our users’ needs and of our concepts.

From our insights, we formed four perceived user needs that we sought to validate through speed-dating of representative storyboards:

- Users need to access accounts in the face of obstacles
- Users need to understand system status in PINACLE
- Users need to connect with relevant support from TMCC
- Users need to know how to perform critical tasks

Our needs validation process revealed that visibility of system status was not as big of a need as our generative research had previously indicated, and that while account access is an ongoing area of friction, that friction is not necessarily a bad thing. The most valuable findings we gained were around the need of PINACLE users to understand how to perform and troubleshoot in the platform.

Users want to be able to troubleshoot and recover from their errors on their own.

Errors within current user flows often result in the need for TMCC support, with limited opportunity for non-admins to course correct.

Users want to learn by example, through demonstration and at their own pace

Step-by-step instructions are most helpful to PINACLE users when the instructions can work along with them.

Lack of confidence is a hurdle to correctly executing tasks

Some experience anxiety over the possibility of mistakes when performing high-stakes tasks.

Users want to perform their tasks quickly and efficiently, but need to be properly equipped to do so

Users perform a calculation between what will resolve their issues most quickly - and sometimes, it’s calling TMCC.

Upon reflection, we realized that all these insights nested well underneath Insight 3 (the mismatch between clients’ expectations of how to learn to use the tool and the reality). The more specific learning from Insights 5-8 would help us to narrow our proposed solutions to our client.

From our insights, we defined the following constraints for ourselves moving forward.

Flexibility

Insight 1 indicates a wide diversity of PINACLE users in terms of tech savviness and experience. These different users encounter overlapping but divergent problems on the platform. Our solution needs to be flexible in how it can support users with various needs.

Error Recovery

Insight 5 shows that users want more opportunity to mitigate their own errors than is currently allowed by feedback and permission constraints. We aim to give users a greater sense of independence by centering autonomous recovery within our solutions.

Reduce User Anxiety

With Insights 7 and 8, we learned that users experience lack of confidence and preparation as an obstacle to efficient job performance. It is imperative that our solution minimize the amount of uncertainty that users experience.

Avoid Redundancy

Finally, we know that PNC is doing a lot of innovation in-house around user flow, account security, and more. We want to align our efforts so that they work in tandem and do not reduplicate current efforts.

We did a variety of ideation exercises as a team in order to explore potential directions for our opportunity space based on our findings. From 20 Questions to Crazy Eights, reversed assumptions to reframing our problem within analogous domains, we used multiple ideation frameworks and tools to generate a wide spectrum of ideas. These exercises also helped us to develop artifacts in the form of storyboards that we shared with stakeholders in speed-dating to gather feedback on concepts.

Crazy Eights

We used Crazy Eights in the early stages of our ideation process to come up with a lot of contrasting ideas very quickly.

20 Questions

To reframe our problem, we directly state the problem we faced, then generated a list of 20 questions about the problem and how to solve it, starting with the most basic questions.

Reversed Assumptions

Another way of reframing our problem was the reversal of our assumptions. We first isolated the challenge, then listed out our assumptions and wrote them in the opposite form. This helped us generate new possible solutions.

Storyboarding

From our concepts, we built storyboards to allow ourselves to develop those early ideas further and gather stakeholder feedback.

Why-How Laddering

After an initial round of solution prototyping, we build Why-How ladders in order to get to deeper insights and underlying issues in our problem space.