Leading tech companies embed their competitive edge in digital products, setting the stage for success from the start. However, traditional financial firms face a challenge here, especially when adopting white-label digital solutions. Aligning them with their unique business essence and customer needs is tough. In finance, digital transformation is essential for shaping the future of financial brands. But how can you align digital services with brand identity, goals and customer needs?
Implementing a strategic approach to design in modern companies is essential for staying ahead in the digital age. The Digital Strategy Pyramid framework offers a simple and structured path to empowering this integration, ensuring that design decisions are aligned with the company’s purpose, market insights, brand identity, service specifics and ecosystem consistency. For example, Apple’s success is due to showing meticulous attention to design potential that results in the best digital competitive advantage in the world, driving customer loyalty and growth worldwide.
The Digital Strategy Pyramid framework is used by UXDA’s digital experience consultants as a part of our financial UX design methodology. It is an easy-to-use and intuitive five-level hierarchy, in which each level is shaped by the previous one, ensuring that the financial product design is fully informed and determined by the digital strategy.
The financial industry is witnessing a seismic shift in consumer expectations. And digital experience consultants can help the company most effectively realize its purpose.
1. Purpose
We start with the Purpose level, encompassing a company’s “why?” through vision, mission, values, goals and its commitment to providing value to customers and society. This level sets the foundation for all business decisions, including design, ensuring they align with the overarching goals.
As Simon Sinek said, money is like fuel. Cars need fuel to drive, but the purpose of the car is not to get more fuel; it simply uses fuel to move people from point A to point B. Business is the same. The purpose of business is not to make money; it’s to serve a more significant meaning or cause, building or providing something.
A clear sense of purpose extends beyond short-term goals and instant challenges, giving direction through a bigger picture of a business and social landscape. It’s fueled by passion and dreams, driving us to make tangible efforts for meaningful results in our businesses and lives.
For financial companies, this may be related to improving people’s lives through simplifying financial transactions, facilitating financial management, improving wealth, providing financial support and education, friendly fees, etc.
Despite the convenience of traditional banking services, customers have grown disillusioned with a system that often appears opaque, profit-driven and disconnected from their values and needs. This disconnect between banks and their customers is a glaring issue. While the digital era has provided an opportunity for a banking revolution, most institutions have merely transplanted their traditional services onto digital platforms. This has left customers yearning for more of a purpose.
According to Havas’ global Meaningful Brands® 2019 research, meaningful brands that are viewed as making the world a better place outperform the stock market by 134%. Accenture Strategy’s global survey of nearly 30,000 consumers found that 52% of respondents have indicated that they prefer brands that believe in something greater than just the products and services they sell. This is also confirmed by a study by New Paradigm Strategy Group & Fortune, which found that 64% of the US population believes that the company’s primary goal should be to “make the world a better place.”
Imagine a financial service designed not only to be functional but also to be used as a vehicle for fulfilling a profound purpose. Consider a bank that views its role as more than just a profit generator but, rather, as a catalyst for positive change in the lives of its customers and society as a whole. Banking product design should be rooted in a clear and resonant business purpose.
2. Market
The next level of the pyramid is the Market level, involving understanding the target audience, customers’ profiles, expectations, needs, usage contexts and pain points.
According to a Salesforce study, 66% of customers expect companies to understand their needs and expectations. So, the financial executives need to have a clear understanding of who their customers are and what they want in order to develop a purpose-driven digital strategy that resonates with them. Deep insights into the customer base are crucial for tailoring design to meet specific customer requirements.
For a financial company, this may include such users as people who struggle with managing finances or people who need reliable service to build their financial well-being, etc.
3. Brand
The third level of the pyramid is the Brand, which involves defining the company’s brand identity and determining how it can be authentically communicated to customers based on Purpose and Market insights. This includes brand guidelines and visual language, as well as the channels and methods through which the brand will be communicated.
Stackla research found that 86% of consumers say authenticity is important when deciding what brands they like and support, but 57% of consumers think that fewer than half of brands resonate as authentic.
Company executives need to ensure that the brand authenticity reflects the purpose and values and resonates with its target audience. Product design in this stage plays a crucial role in consistently conveying the brand’s essence, ensuring consistency and differentiating it from its competitors. A study by McKinsey demonstrates that a consistent brand experience can increase customer satisfaction by 20%, leading to greater brand loyalty, and a Lucidpress State of Brand Consistency Report found that consistent branding can increase revenue by 33%.
For a financial company, this translates into creating a brand that is innovative, trustworthy and reliable.
4. Service
The fourth level relies on the aspect of Service. This stage involves making crucial determinations regarding the range of services a company will offer in order to fulfill its Purpose within the target Market in line with the Brand identity.
According to Zendesk research, 81% of customers will make another purchase following a positive customer service experience while 61% would switch to a competitor, after one negative experience.
In the banking context, these encompass essential services, such as fund transfers, deposit accounts, credit accounts, insurance products, investment opportunities and various other financial instruments, including services that facilitate financial management and budgeting.
5. Ecosystem
The final level of the pyramid is the Ecosystem, which includes all the digital products and elements needed to interact with customers. It is the main infrastructure and support that enables the company to function and serve its customers. This includes things like mobile and online banking, as well as the internal systems and processes that support these services.
According to Forrester, the key challenges to delivering a good CX are internal struggles: the lack of a cohesive strategy across teams (48%) and silos of various CX operations and functions across the organization (38%). At the same time, a Wunderman Thompson study shows that ensuring a seamless experience through all channels is a top priority for 42% of consumers.
Financial companies need to ensure that their digital ecosystems provide a consistent and frictionless experience to its customers and employees across all touchpoints. A cohesive and user-centric digital ecosystem is crucial for retaining customers and creating a competitive advantage in the modern world.
For example, Apple’s digital strategy revolves around creating a seamless and integrated ecosystem of hardware and software that simplifies technology for its diverse customer base. This approach helps them fulfill their purpose of enriching people’s lives through technology, making it more accessible and enjoyable.
1. Purpose
Apple’s purpose is to unleash, support and inspire creativity in people. They implement innovations to empower individuals, redefine possibilities and challenge conventions. From education to healthcare, from creative arts to business, Apple’s purpose is to set new standards and inspire others to push boundaries. Apple aspires to be a catalyst for implementing positive global change. Apple’s design-driven innovative approach is not about making things look nice; it’s about harnessing the power of design to fulfill a revolutionary purpose.
2. Market
Apple users are at the heart of everything they do. Apple designs products with empathy, seeking to understand their customers’ desires, challenges and dreams. Apple’s primary customers are those who value a delightful and innovative user experience and need simple but powerful digital solutions to move their creativity to the next level. Apple customers seek high-quality, well-designed devices and services for various purposes, including communication, work, entertainment and creativity. Customers’ pain points that Apple addresses include compatibility issues, complex user interfaces and a lack of seamless integration among devices.
3. Brand
Apple’s brand is synonymous with innovation and sophistication. Their visual language incorporates these elements through a sleek user interface, reinforcing the brand’s premium image. Apple believes in creating a brand that last, reduces environmental impact and provide enduring value to its customers. It’s a purpose-driven commitment to sustainability and responsible design. Apple’s brand philosophy is to create intuitive, aesthetically pleasing, functional products. That’s why the design approach is critical to Apple’s brand identity.
4. Services
Apple’s design-driven innovations have a ripple effect across industries. To simplify and improve the user experience wherever they go, Apple introduced multiple innovations, such as the first graphical user interface with a mouse, reimagining the music experience, inventing buttonless mobile computing and moving toward spatial mixed reality. All the services Apple provides are focused on its primary mission to unleash and support everyone’s creativity on the go without the need to learn any technology. And they are constantly expanding their services in accordance with their purpose.
5. Ecosystem
Design at Apple is not a superficial layer; it’s the driving force behind their disruptive innovations. Apple’s products are designed to remove barriers, to make technology more accessible and to enhance the way people connect, create and communicate. Apple’s ecosystem seamlessly integrates services with its devices, creating a unified user experience that benefits users with a consistent design language and user flow.
To deliver services according to its purpose, Apple designed a range of innovative products such as MacBook, iMac, Mac, iPad, iPhone, AppleWatch, AirPods, Apple TV and Apple Vision Pro. The consistent design of those products is informed by the upper levels of the Digital Strategy Pyramid, creating a digital ecosystem through the AppStore, iTunes and iCloud to simultaneously provide a synergistic, frictionless and delightful user experience across all devices. Apple uses design as a vehicle for positive impact, creating products and experiences that elevate the human spirit and transform how we interact with technology.
Strategy-Driven Design is Central to Digital Customer Satisfaction
The financial industry’s future is inextricably tied to a digital transformation. It’s not merely about adopting technology; it’s about reimagining financial services through digital products to serve and satisfy customers effectively.
Digital services are no longer secondary to financial products; they have become products in themselves. Customer satisfaction hinges on how thoughtfully and effectively these digital experiences are designed.
To bridge the gap between customer expectations and digital offerings, design must be integrated with a strategic approach. It’s not just about designing screens; it’s about designing a path that aligns with business goals. It sets the tone for how customers perceive and interact with your financial brand digitally.
Customer satisfaction in the financial industry hinges on the thoughtfulness and success of digital design. Financial executives should recognize that digital services themselves have become the products for which customers come, making design integration with strategy imperative. And the UXDA Digital Strategy Pyramid framework offers a structured approach to aligning digital product design with strategy in the financial industry.
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- Source: https://www.finextra.com/blogposting/25050/how-to-align-product-design-with-brand-strategy-in-digital-banking?utm_medium=rssfinextra&utm_source=finextrablogs
