Understanding Customer Motivations

“Customer Self-Service Portal”
Fannie Mae // Fall 2017 - Spring 2018
Customer Research, Site-Visit Logistics, Research and Synthesis

Fannie Mae provides indirect financing to Americans looking to buy homes but does not interact directly with end consumers. Instead, the company buys mortgages issued by banks and other financial institutions, freeing up capital for those entities to continue lending. The company has over 1400 customers looking to sell loans to them, and on any given day will field hundreds or even thousands of calls from customers looking for clarification on selling guidelines, servicing policies, or technical support.

Anyone familiar with call centers is aware they are hugely expensive to run and dissatisfaction with a company’s call center can sour the entire brand.

My Role

I lead a small team comprised of one other service designer/design researcher. I planned our interview protocols, site visit logistics, and managed stakeholders. We worked closely with the UI/UX team who were distinct from our team and helped them generate backlog items, while they focused on immediate enhancements.

The Challenge

How might we improve the self-service experience for the company’s customers? Could a smarter self-service platform become a point of competitive differentiation?

Constraints

The company has major market influence and is used to imposing solutions on their customers. There is a culture fearful of looking weak by not already knowing what the customer wants, and also of what might happen if they ask and cannot deliver on all the customer demands. This has manifested itself into several gatekeepers between the general business and the customers.

The Process

We knew access to customers would be a recurring issue, so we involved the product team significantly more than on a usual research engagement. This dramatically improved the “political” firepower we brought when requesting access to customers.

We also involved the primary customer gatekeepers, the account managers, very closely in the process. We interviewed them about their customers first, walked them through our interview protocols in detail, and carefully reviewed our plans for the day-long site visits so that in the end our research efforts would be seen as a customer service win for the account managers as well.

During our on-site engagements we started with a general overview of our project and objectives and had high-level conversations with the customer’s management. We then broke into two-person teams and conducted 30-60 minute interviews with a variety of roles around the offices, adjusting the conversations on the fly if we felt we needed to focus on specific roles or topics.

In addition to the six onsite customer visits where we interviewed over 60 individuals, we also visited the company’s own call centers and spoke with an additional dozen staff to understand the backstage components of customer service.

The Outcome

We gathered all of our research and distilled insights — a series of customer service strategic principles as well as tactical recommendations. We took this on a series of presentations around the company: the product owner team, the leadership of the customer account managers, and a variety of customer support teams.

The SVP in charge of the product team declared that the insights were his “goldmine” and would provide solid guidance for their enhancement pipeline for a years’ worth of development sprints.

Later in the year a customer provided feedback that the enhancements to the self-service portal had caused his bank to increase deliveries to Fannie Mae by 18% due to how much easier and more efficient it was now to find answers to their loan delivery questions.

Surprisingly, we also uncovered a totally new role that most of our customers had. This role was not a secret, but the majority of the product teams were unaware of this role’s existence; this opened their minds up about further direct research with our customers.