When Scott Zimmer, MVP of Innovation & Digital Design for Capital One, took the stage during Forrester’s CXNYC 2015 customer experience conference, his goal was to raise eyebrows.
Zimmer spoke heavily about design, which is not something that Capital One has typically been known for. But when it comes to CX, the brand is starting to shift its perceptions on the form and function of effective customer engagement.
“There has been a huge awakening at Capital One, and it is all about customer experience,” said Zimmer, during a speaker spotlight Q&A. “And every experience can be thoughtfully designed through a combination of a design orientated culture and expert designers.”
Compared to many of the major financial institutions, Capital One is a relatively new industry player. As an IPO, it is actually the same age as Amazon, which puts Capital One in a prime position to leverage its modern mindset to disrupt outdated industry standards.
In fact, during its short legacy, this is already how Capital One is often perceived.
“Our wedge into the industry really was one of disruption,” Zimmer said. “Capital One had more of a mindset of being an information based technology company than one that only sought to understand ledgers, and so on.”
Today Capital One continues to rely on this same mindset to rethink the problem of providing an effective customer experience.
Zimmer admits that it is common for many brands to say they focus on optimizing customer experience. However, Capital One found that there are often disconnects between those that claim to be customer-centric, and those that actually put such ideas into practice.
Capital One set to remedy this disconnect by first understanding their customer’s problems before actually trying to solve these problems. To do this, it redoubled its efforts to focus on a design-centric approach to customer experience that was purposefully creative.
“Design thinking is a powerful mindset, and it isn’t something that most business leaders, at least certainly not at banks, have been using over the past few decades,” said Zimmer. “We used design thinking to do three things.”
First, Zimmer recommends getting close enough to actually empathize with customers. Without first deeply understanding customer problems - from their perspective - a meaningful solution can never be truly implemented.
Once the problem is identified and intimately understood, the second phase of design thinking involves developing a cost-effective prototype solution. Finally, phase three requires brands to test, test, and retest these prototypes until they are right.
What’s interesting is that Capital One not only implements this design strategy to optimize its customer experience; it also uses it to improve the internal workings of its overall company culture as well.
“Across the company now, we are evangelizing this notion that design is more than customer centricity,” Zimmer said. “Design is understanding and solving for customer problems. And it is a mindset that everyone can adopt.”
About the Author: Mark Johnson
Mark is CEO & CMO of Loyalty360. He has significant experience in selling, designing and administering prepaid, loyalty/CRM programs, as well as data-driven marketing communication programs.