Self-Directed Investor Customer Experience Strategy
2021
As a Senior Program Manager at frog, I co-led a team of 5 people (Strategists, Designers, and Design Lead) to develop strategic recommendations for our client in order to retain their current self-directed investors as well as to engage new customers in face of increased competition in this space. Self-directed means for investors to trade or invest on their own or with the brokerage’s help.
In this role, I acted as the account lead - the client-facing point of contact, scoped out the work/timeline, established activities, milestones, and deliverables for the team, engaged with external recruitment vendors and prospective interviewees, and took final responsibility for all presentations/deliverables.
Even though my primary role on the team was program management, I also acted as a design strategist working with the team to perform design research, synthesized data, and ideated few ideas for our strategic recommendations. Finally, we did design sprints to prototype few concepts associated with the chosen strategic direction. The result is great client satisfaction and continued business with them to iterate on this further.
What I did with the Team
Research
I engaged a Recruitment vendor to find current and prospective customers around nation - did legal paperwork for confidentiality and payment of incentives.
I gathered secondary research from client and led team in landscape mapping and research protocol.
We spoke with about 12 customers and 10 client stakeholders
This was all done during the pandemic - virtual engagement - a unique challenge.
Framework
Based on the research, we mapped the interviewees across the board and created 4 archetypes.
We then ideated 3 strategic directions for these archetypes and had the client decided where to drill down deeper.
I was one of the team members working with the design lead to lead activities, synthesis, and client discussions.
Insights
We realized there were individualized and coherent touchpoints across the investing ecosystem.
We had to help find the self-directed investors develop their own voice, connect with community, and gain confidence with our client.
We identified different engagement points on the website and mobile app to accomplish the goals for the customers.
I led the team to create high-fidelity prototypes for some of the tools to use to engage with the customers.