How might we move 17 million credit card customers from calling the bank to serving themselves?
I ran the research and the self-service journeys for a unified credit card ecosystem across HDFC's channels. Support queries fell 28%, and the interim delivery won two further projects I went on to lead.
Project Overview
CX transformation · 7 weeks
The Business Challenge
India's largest private bank, and the world's 4th largest by market capitalisation. Any question its card product could not answer became a call, so service requests kept escalating, pushing operational overheads up and customer satisfaction down.
The Impact
End-to-end delivery rather than a set of interface fixes, so the drop in support queries came with higher service usage and higher satisfaction.
The Team
Group Lead
Senior Design Consultant - me
Design Consultant
My Role
Research, Workshop Design & Facilitation, Service Design, Product Strategy, UX Design, Prototyping (low to high fidelity), Stakeholder & Project Management
The Process
The engagement ran for seven weeks, from research through to a prioritised strategy in a single pass, and nothing was designed until we had mapped the bank's own estate.
Research
We ran three rounds of research, each answering what the last one could not: what the bank believed, what its card estate actually looked like, and where journeys broke against the systems behind them.
Stakeholder Interviews
We interviewed eight stakeholders across verticals before anything was drawn, and the disagreements between them were the useful part: each owner assumed another held the stretch of journey that nobody actually held. Their answers set the vision the work was measured against, and named the constraints the strategy had to survive.
Ecosystem Mapping
Workshops laid every touch point, proposition and process out in one view, because a channel reads as complete until it sits beside the one a customer switches to. Two findings came out of it: cross-channel interaction was thin, and some stretches of the journey had no touch point at all.
Journey & Service Mapping
We mapped the as-is journeys from ethnographic studies and the bank's own support data, so every pain point arrived with evidence attached to it. Each journey was then mapped down onto the back-end processes carrying it, and that second layer is what turned a list of complaints into a diagnosis: the disjointed experience traced straight back to system gaps.
Key Problems
Three barriers stood between a cardholder and doing it themselves, and each one showed up twice: in the journey maps, and in the support data behind the calls. None of them sat inside a single channel.
- 01
Limited Access
Card information was hard to reach and card management was harder to navigate. A customer who could not finish a task did not abandon it, they phoned instead, so every gap in access arrived as a call.
- 02
Insufficient Value
Customers could not tell what their reward points were worth. Engagement fell away, not because the value was missing but because it could not be read.
- 03
Fragmented Solutions
The ecosystem ran in silos, so any journey that crossed touch points came apart between them. Customers wanted one place to manage the card, and what the bank had was a set of channels each holding part of the answer.
The Opportunity
How might we let a customer finish the task themselves, and want to come back to the card?
Strategic Directions
We set these with the bank's stakeholders rather than presenting them, so the goals left the room owned rather than argued over. Everything designed afterwards had to answer to one of the three.
- 01
Integrate Key Functionalities
Every card service across the value chain was brought into a single self-service journey. The complexity a customer currently resolves by phoning has to sit somewhere, so the system absorbs it instead, which is Tesler's Law settled in the bank's favour: the move that removes friction also removes the call.
- 02
Revamp UX for Key Touch Points
We rebuilt the primary digital touch points to set the industry benchmark rather than meet it. Adoption of a self-service journey is decided on the first attempt, so the interfaces had to be legible before they were persuasive.
- 03
Gamified Ecosystem for Reward Points
One ecosystem joined the bank's products, with rewards as the thread running through it. Gamification gives a customer a reason to return between transactions, and cross-sell, service adoption and higher spend follow from that.
Strategy & Delivery
We prioritised first, shipped the fixes that could not wait, then designed the long-term system. Splitting the work by what HDFC could deliver, and when, is what let a seven-week strategy survive contact with a roadmap.
Impact-Effort Mapping
Everything the research surfaced went onto a single impact-effort map, run with the people who would have to build it, so execution constraints entered the strategy while it could still change shape. Two phases came out of it: the quick wins no longer waited on the platform work, and the platform work was no longer compressed into a release it could not fit.
Interim Solutions
A heuristic evaluation turned a pile of complaints into defects with a named principle behind each one, which is what stops them being argued over. The fixes went at the pain points the journey maps had already isolated, and each shipped with pilot and launch KPIs attached, so it could be tested and iterated rather than declared finished.
Long-Term Solutions
The interim delivery bought the mandate for the long term: HDFC awarded two further projects on the back of it, one for customer acquisition and one for rewards management, and I led both work-streams. Acquisition is where a customer's relationship with the card starts and rewards is where it either continues or lapses, so we designed the two as one system rather than as two products.
Design Samples: Phase One
These are the phase one fixes, drawn against the pain points the journey maps had already isolated.
Design Samples: Phase Two
These are the two work-streams that followed: the digital customer acquisition journeys, and the unified rewards ecosystem.
Business Impact
- 01
A 28% drop in customer support queries once the solutions were implemented end to end.
- 02
Drop-offs fell among new customers moving through the redesigned digital acquisition journeys.
- 03
Nine minutes cut from the time a bank representative spends onboarding a new customer.
- 04
One unified rewards ecosystem, and with it more engagement and more cross-sell across products.
Key Learnings
- 01
Price the problem before you present the solution. Name what the current experience costs in support calls and lost customers, then show the design that removes it. Craft does not carry a room that is not design mature.
- 02
Map the back stage before you promise the front. Every disjointed journey here traced back to a system gap, so design what the organisation can already deliver and name what it has to fix first.
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