Understanding the Advisor Experience

Alignment & Planning

The Ask -  

  • The Design leaders in Private Bank were asked to participate in the annual planning for Wealth Management

  • In preparation for the planning sessions, they wanted to understand what our design team thought the biggest issues are facing our users to aid in prioritization

 

Planning –

Gathering Existing Research –

  • The research team connected with researchers across the org to ask about existing research we could pull together

  • We reached out to our business partners to gather any feedback collected from advisors

Workshops –

  • Planned workshops to gather existing knowledge across the whole design org in an efficient manner

Plan for Interviews –

  • While we had a lot of existing research, most efforts were product focused there was very little research emphasizing the experience level insights. We decided to conduct some exploratory interviews to see what else we might uncover

Journey map created after pulling existing research

Execution

Interviews – Next we decided to talk to the users themselves to understand how they do their job, what are their most important tasks and responsibilities in their roles, and the current pain points and challenges they face in accomplishing those tasks.

Synthesis – My team then went through all the feedback and grouped what we heard into themes. We created a report deck that defined the three main themes we uncovered with an explanation of impact and examples of how these themes come to light.

Guidelines – These themes helped us create guidelines for the product teams to help with planning and prioritization as well as aiding in accessing proposed solutions to assure they don’t aim to improve one problem while unintentionally causing other problems.

  • Example – A solution may aim to provide more transparency into the process, but may do so by adding more information to an already cluttered tool and send out email alerts to inboxes that are already overflowing with messages.

Results -

The 3 top priority tasks for the advisors were:

  • Prospecting – Finding new Clients

  • Identifying opportunities for new strategies for the clients

  • Deepening Client Relationships

We identified that these issues were getting in the way of advisors engaging on the priority tasks:

Synthesis Board of Workshops and Interviews

Outcomes

Share outs with the DCE teams –

  • Some teams leveraged these themes in their quarterly planning sessions with their product teams

  • Partnered with other innovation teams to collaborate on future visions based on this work

Kicked off more Journey/Personas Work

  • Several product teams reached out to initiate work that would examine their experiences at a closer level

A guidance document was created so that product teams could leverage when accessing their solutions

  • When teams are focused on their problems it’s common to overlook any additional problems their solutions may cause

    • Example – In an effort to improve transparency, a product team may opt to send out email updates and add alerts into the advisor system. While this helps one problem it can cause two others.