The objective

A bank was launching a new personal loans offering, and wanted to understand the experience customers had when applying for loans through traditional bank providers currently available in the market, in order identify where the current pain-points might be, to ensure their application process would be easy for the customer, and to compare and hopefully evidence it was simpler and more customer-friendly than those offered by competitors.

The approach

• We ran a research project with 3 elements -an online survey through our Viewsbank panel to capture quantitatively how consumers felt about the process when they had applied for real personal loans, and what made a positive or negative experience, then both an online and in-branch journey mystery shop, where we tasked Viewsbankers to engage with banks in order to begin the process of applying for personal loans.
• The respondents carried out the tasks and provided in depth feedback on various measures and points in the journey, to enable us to compare and assess the customer journeys offered by the selected competitors.

The impact

We found that there were common themes in customer journeys which were seen to be a hassle or create work for the customers when engaging with competitive providers, which the bank we were carrying out the research for was able to emphasise as being a differentiator for them if a customer were to use their new service in materials supporting the new offer launch. It also meant that due diligence had been done in ensuring that hypotheses around what made a good or bad experience from the stance of being customer-first in its offering was evidenced by consumer research and incorporated into the proposition.

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