Putting customers at the heart of The Co-operative Bank

The solution

Our initial research convinced us that the Co-op Bank had to shift its focus from sales to service. We distilled our findings into a set of three principles that guided the design of a new online banking journey:

• Transparent
• Simple
• Reassuring

Rather than slogans dreamt up by a marketing agency, these principles emerged from the intersection of customer research, the bank’s core values ("Listening and caring about what matters to you") and the spirit of the FCA's mission ("...to ensure firms have their customers at the heart of how they do business").

To deliver an experience that embodied these principles, we knew we would have to bring everyone involved on the journey with us; from commercial, product and compliance teams to senior stakeholders.

In doing so, we exposed the evidence for our customer-centred design decisions and created an audit trail showing that we were acting in customers' best interests.

By fostering cross-functional working relationships from the start and working with an iterative design method that involved the right people at the right time, we helped Martin build trust between the compliance and commercial teams and gain confidence from the wider business.

During rigorous validation testing of our new journeys, customers - without prompting - used the words ‘transparency, ‘simplicity’ and ‘reassuring’. After launch, the commercial benefits were quickly realised too, with conversions and the Net Promoter Score increasing beyond expectation.