Secil Watson Tells Jesse James Garrett About Experience Design at Wells Fargo

by Jesse James Garrett
March 12, 2008

Jesse James Garrett [JJG]: Hi, I’m Jesse James Garrett. I’m here with Secil Watson, senior vice president of Internet channel strategy at Wells Fargo Bank, and one of the speakers MX San Francisco, a conference focused on managing experiences through creative leadership, April 20-22. Welcome, Secil.

Secil Watson [SW]: Welcome. Hi, how are you?

JJG: Your talk at MX is going to be about the path that you took to your position managing a strategy team at Wells Fargo. Why don’t you tell me a little bit about your background and how you found yourself in this position?

SW: Sure. I joined Wells Fargo and their online strategy team about five, almost six years ago. My background was in management consulting, marketing, servicing, customer service, as well as e-learning. I hads worked for consulting companies for a long time and then a leading e-learning company prior to joining Wells Fargo. When I came to Wells Fargo, my initial role was to help the company find a consulting company who would build a sales strategy for our online channel, which had been around for about five years. Wells Fargo Online was the first online bank.

When I joined the company, they were making the transition from being an online servicing group, where people could access their accounts and check their balances, to one where they could start a relationship with their customers, through selling anything from checking accounts to brokerage accounts to services on those accounts. When I joined initially, my role was to be a liaison with other consulting companies and do the strategy. What I realized very quickly was in order to make the website work well, be a selling website, and achieve the business goals that Wells Fargo had, we needed to make it more customer-centric.

Nothing in my background said customer experience specifically — I don’t think the term was even invented when I was going to business school — so it was interesting for me to find other professionals who were looking at the customer and trying to build a group of user experience professionals who actually cared about the customer experience as much as I did and create it, on the go.

One of the first things we did was design some projects that would prove that we should base our decisions on the customer’s point of view. The first project we did at Wells Fargo changed the homepage of WellsFargo.com from a marketing- and push-centric site — a lot of advertising but not a lot of good ways for people to find what they were looking for — to one that was more appropriate for customer tasks: the key tasks that the customers wanted to accomplish online.

JJG: Did you find, as you started to take on this challenge, resistance within the organization to taking this experience-focused view to the design of the website?

SW: The resistance came more from not being familiar with the terms and with the methodologies than it was because Wells preferred the other way of doing things.

I think that the Internet was still a new channel. As it had evolved, it had evolved organically and reflected the business organizational divisions of the bank. So our old homepage had tabs on it that said, “Personal Banking,” “Personal Finance,” “Investing,” “Small Business,” and “Commercial Services.” You would maybe think that investing is actually part of personal finance; it is, of course, but in our case we had different groups organizationally that were managing the banking business versus the investing business, so they each wanted their own tab. This was purely because of the division of labor required to maintain their pages, update their websites, and have control over their domain.

It was not necessarily intended to be an experience for the customer. But when you actually show the teams that from a customer’s perspective, investing and personal finance fall within the same realm, it does make sense to them. But in order to prove the point, we had to do a lot of user research, which was a discipline that was pretty new for the bank at the time. We had to teach product managers the principles of user research, the differences between qualitative research versus quantitative research, and how we could use both of them together to make a fact-based decision that would be more customer-centric.

The biggest hesitation we see in product managers, typically, is the time horizon for our decision. A lot of the time, we’re trying to make decisions that are viable from business and technical perspectives, don’t cost an arm and a leg, and are easy to maintain. That means they have both short- and long-term benefits to the company and that they have a positive business case. But they’re also sound from a consumer’s perspective, a customer’s perspective that they actually are usable for the customer and also, hopefully, good experiences for the customers. To get those three things done, you can’t be in an environment where one point of view is making a trade off that will make the other one worse. So we’re in an optimization mindset, and in that optimization mindset, you had to do some give and take.

Product management typically wants to maximize the business value of the project, which translates to as cheaply as possible, as quickly as possible, and getting as much upside from the project as possible. What we were trying to inject into that culture was a look at the longer-term customer impact, from a broader perspective, and how to optimize for the customer’s interest as well as the business interest.

JJG: It’s been about five years since you started this, right? Have you seen a shift in the way the entire organization looks at customer experience?

SW: Yes, there has been a shift both for the Internet business of Wells Fargo and Wells Fargo overall. I think we have definitely created a language and a practice around user-centered design and experience management. We don’t necessarily have the title of the chief customer officer or anything of that sort, but there’s a lot of senior-level stakeholder interest in being able to manage things in a more holistic, systematic fashion, that actually takes a look at the customer experience across the group.

We still have product groups, of course: A home equity group, consumer finance group, consumer deposits group. They all look at their business from the product perspective, but they’ve also all incorporated some level of customer experience perspective that goes beyond just their product group or their responsibility area to look at the interplay of what the customer sees as one Wells Fargo.

There has been a change at the executive level. There’s also been a change in the way that we do our work in that every single new innovation that we put out there and with every new product development project serves to make the customer experience better. Now, there’s also a methodology of how we get the customer’s opinion at every instance before we get something out the door. We’re utilizing more user research and quantitative research to improve the overall experience. Looking at web logs and customer service center calls to generate quantitative data to support the customer’s points of view. These results reflect what we hear in qualitative research and we make decisions based on those data points.

JJG: I think this is really a challenge that a lot of managers are facing right now in terms of building a user experience competency inside an organization as well as really being able to sell that competency and encourage the business to take an experience-focused mindset. What advice would you have for someone who is just starting out on that process?

SW: The first thing is finding a high-visibility project that the team can undertake and then using that project as a stepping stone towards getting broader buy-in from people in the organization. For my team, that was the homepage project and it was followed by other large redesign projects that we did on the site. Once you get an early win, use the methodology, policies, and practices that you’re promoting as the crowning jewel of your argument of why this works with before and after statistics. You can get customer perspectives on how the changes impacted them; business data on how it changed the business variables, increased sales and interest in the company, reduced the phone calls to the phone centers or any other benefits.

Getting a high visibility project and being successful is definitely the first step. The second step is not just stopping at that project but really formalizing the methodology and making the methodology accessible to people who are not designers or content managers. To do that, you need to have a simple set of tools that you can brand and use consistently from project to project and introduce to people, like product managers or engineers or marketing managers, within the projects that you do.

For us, it was really important to have a set of user profiles that we could use in every project and similarly, a user task model that defined all the customer’s managing financial tasks.

This model was a quantified task model: It told us what tasks people did to manage their finances, how frequently they did it, how important these tasks were, and how important the channels with a bank or financial institution was for people.

These two tools were very central to how we created a user-centered design practice. Having tangible tools plus successful projects allows for an easier transition when introducing people to the same tools and methodology.

JJG: Excellent. Well, thank you very much for your time, Secil, and we look forward to hearing more of your experiences at MX San Francisco.

SW: That’s great, looking forward to it.

Edited for clarity.