How ING Spain conducts rapid research to improve their digital experience

ING Spain is the Spanish arm of ING, a multinational banking and financial services provider with offices in over twenty countries. UserZoom enables ING Spain to rapidly research changing user attitudes and behaviors to uncover pain points online, then allows them to design and test concepts that help to improve the digital experience and customer satisfaction and encourage channel shift to more profitable customer service channels.

The problem

• Many calls to ING’s contact center were from users unable to use the self-service website or app to achieve their goals. This was impacting costs, profitability, and user satisfaction 
• A significant number of users were unable to find common banking actions, such as transferring money or downloading payment history
• While the ‘My Account self-service product page on the ING Spain website matched global brand values, many users struggled to understand the content displayed

The solution

• By getting feedback from a variety of sources, ING was able to quickly add the most pressing usability issues to its design and development stack
• ING used UserZoom to test Information Architecture, including Card Sorting and Tree Testing, to reorder and regroup key product journeys
• Using Click Testing, ING was able to understand users' first impressions of content and triangulate this data with their behavior

The results

• Only 0.7% of app users call the call center to complete their tasks, and this number continues to fall over time 
• A redesigned information architecture and the menu structure have reduced the number of calls and complaints related to findability
• ING has iterated new designs of their product, which retain their brand identity while significantly improving users' first impressions and understanding of account information 

Improving the digital experience in response to changing behaviors

Rapid changes in online and mobile technologies have driven changes in customer behavior and increased user expectations over the last few years. At the same time, like many other banks, ING has identified that traditional approaches are slower and more expensive than digital banking and are being used less frequently by customers. 

Due to the complexity of maintaining an outstanding and evolving digital banking experience, the UX team at ING Spain turned to UserZoom to help improve the success of its digital products.

Gaining insight from customer feedback

ING's digital team works within an agile framework. Within their fortnightly sprints, they focus on collecting feedback; analyzing and prioritizing feedback; conceptualizing and testing; validating, and deploying. 

ING deployed a range of methods to gain insight into improving customer experiences, including sources originated outside of the UX team, such as Voice of the Customer (VOC) surveys and Contact surveys. Across all interactions, ING Spain captured Customer Effort Scores (CES), which they use to track how customers feel about their recent interactions. CES figures are monitored longitudinally, enabling ING to track progress.

By combining and cross-referencing these approaches with web analytics, ING can understand customer behavior across their digital platforms and common pain points, which can then be prioritized and entered into their design, research, and development stacks.