What most leaders miss when creating and selling a financial services product vision

Any financial services company’s product vision usually starts with a perceived opportunity: your sales or customer support team reports a problem they think can be solved with a new platform or service. It seems like an exciting idea, at first. Plans are made, teams are built, and dollars are spent. 

Six months later, you realize the end result doesn’t actually solve the problem. Or it doesn’t align with your long-term vision of the ideal customer journey. But by the time you have this revelation, you’ve crossed the rubicon — and wasted company resources.

Customer insight should shape the product — not the biggest paycheck in the room

As mentioned above, most financial services product visions are based on anecdotal evidence or ideas from one or two teams. Other times, they’re based on one specific client’s pain point. Here’s why that’s problematic, especially for financial enterprises.

Siloed communication across departments

Financial services companies are creating more and more positions within their organizations to better communicate client insights across departments. These new roles may include titles such as chief customer officer or chief experience officer. Their sole priority is to establish the voice of customer (VoC) during decision making and to balance these needs with other business needs.

Why? Corporations don’t always communicate between teams. But to facilitate a big-picture understanding of the customer’s needs, this communication is critical. 

However, communication across departments is inevitably a major undertaking  — even with someone serving in this conduit role. It can take several months of work to collect thorough insight from everyone within every department involved in creating a customer journey.

So while it may be tempting to only look at the sales and marketing journey, and not, say, product support, this lack of communication can actually create more gaps in your product vision. More importantly, the vision won’t serve the greater objectives of the company. Instead, it will provide a short-term fix for a problem that only a couple of teams have discussed.

One customer’s problem is not every customer’s problem

Here’s another common scenario: let’s say you have a major, high-paying customer that occupies about 30% of your company’s time, budget, and resources. They are the white whale you landed to build your business. This is the client most likely to reach out to your customer service team and the most often. For all those reasons, you feel a certain obligation to deliver a product that fits their particular needs. 

They may have their own idea of a product they need to make their lives easier. Fair enough. You should take their feedback and the customer service team’s feedback into account. 

But even though this client represents a large portion of your company’s portfolio, their notion of an ideal product is still subjective and not representative of your other existing and future customers’ pain points. What you’re missing is hard data and customer insight based on your platform’s current state.

The goal in introducing a new product is to create one with a long-term vision that maximizes positive impact on your end-to-end customer journey — and not just one client’s experience.

How to ensure you’re selling a long-term, customer-driven, financial product vision

1. Map out your current customer experience to identify opportunities

Customers experiencing and using your current products are the best resource you have. How a customer uses an app, for instance — how they find it, download it, log in, and use its features, are all ripe for insight. 

But there are other touchpoints, too. Consider how a user receives communications from the app or navigates customer support. There may be gaps and opportunities you’re not even aware of because you haven’t looked at the full scope of the journey.

So map your customer’s existing journey. What are all the available touchpoints for a customer to discover your product? Include a blend of both quantitative and qualitative analysis. You want the numbers, of course, but benchmark surveys and customer interviews are often more valuable. 

2. Create an ideal customer journey

Armed with insight, you can address gaps and shortcomings and begin to envision what your ideal customer journey will look like. In the best-case scenario, this new journey map considers all the customer’s pain points — including the ones you’ve already addressed and the ones that still need to be. 

For example, you may discover the area most worthy of investment isn’t the retention phase so much as the awareness phase — or vice versa.  Whatever the case may be, the new roadmap should incorporate all your findings from mapping and analyzing your current customer’s journey as we discussed in the previous section.

3. Build a functional prototype

This is the most important step. Designing and building a prototype that envisions an ideal customer journey is the most effective way to sell your vision to all stakeholders involved. A rapid, tangible prototype your stakeholders can react to is much more inspiring than discussing vision and scope in a presentation deck or a blank whiteboard. By making your prototype as real as it can be, you can inspire buy-in from across your organization.

Building a functional prototype is also cost-effective. In financial services especially, development cycles are long and often require big-budget spending. Instead of wasting six months on developing a complex experience that may or may not actually be effective, a rapid prototype combined with customer feedback will provide valuable insight to steer your investment. This can be something as simple as clickable wireframes or something slightly more functional like an HTML prototype that you put in front of customers to glean insight. Either way, your business has real-world evidence that the concept is worth the investment. Further, it protects your organization against misguided — and costly — development plans.

4. Create a roadmap that includes continuous customer feedback and insights 

Your work shouldn’t stop after you sell your product vision. For one thing, the prototype isn’t your finished product, and you need to make that clear to your stakeholders. Instead, you should pitch the prototype as a vision of what’s possible. And yes, it will take some fine-tuning and continuous customer insight to optimize it.

Secondly, it’s important to create opportunities for continuous customer feedback as you build your product. Ensuring the product is informed by customers will drive loyalty and improve ROI.

How one financial wellness business went from roadmap to production

Best Egg, a leading financial services company specializing in online credit and financial wellness, discovered a need to expand their digital offering.

To start, they looked at customer insight and determined where they might focus their energy. The company was known for creating financial products and resources that inspired confidence in their customers, but it was through consumer insights that they learned that their customers needed a platform that would improve their financial health, specifically with their credit score. 

Best Egg then sought out a partner to help assess the customer journey and develop a solution with a roadmap that ensured customers’ needs were being met. In order to meet the needs of the target audience and help inform the new platform experience, we began by examining the customer journey within personal loans to help identify opportunities within their existing product.  From there, they were able to map out an ideal customer experience.

O3 worked with Best Egg to visualize the overall experience. Together, we created a prototype to better visualize an end-to-end journey and highlight key features and data points to consider as the Best Egg team built out the new platform. By going beyond requirements and creating a detailed vision for the future, we were able to inform product development and create a seamless transition from prototype to prioritized roadmap to production.

Selling your financial services product vision requires more than ideas 

Selling a new product vision to stakeholders requires more than just a clever idea. A lot of time, effort, and money hang in the balance. But you’re likely to sell your idea to both internal stakeholders and customers if you have a functional prototype based on an ideal journey map — one with real customer validation. It’s how you bring a lasting product vision to life.