“You Don’t Worry About a Mistake Setting up an App on Your iPhone, but if You Mess up with Your Banking, that’s Worrisome.”

Silo Busting 60: Gamification and Digital Banking with John Findlay and Alex Jimenez

If a bank releases a new digital product, but it’s not intuitive enough to resonate with customers, does it make a noise? When a bank undergoes a major digital transformation, what steps can they take to help ensure the experience they’ve painstakingly crafted resonates with customers and makes the right kind of noise in the marketplace? These are the sorts of questions Alex Jimenez, EPAM’s Managing Principal of Financial Services Consulting, is asking of John Findlay, CEO of LemonadeLXP, in this #TakeItToTheBank conversation.

For many years now, Findlay and LemonadeLXP have introduced gamification to the onboarding process to improve the adoption rates of new digital products as banks roll these experiences out to their customers. “Inherently, we all want to believe we build software that’s intuitive, that people will easily understand and get up to speed on quickly,” says Findlay. “I think that optimism is born out of seeing amazing products like the iPhone and the iPad, but what’s forgotten is Apple had trillions to invest in UX.”

So how can banks make customers feel comfortable with their new tech following a major digital transformation? Findlay says: “The best way to drive adoption is through your frontline. But what we’ve learned is that at about 70% of financial institutions' staff don’t bank with their employer. So, if they don’t bank with you, they don’t use your tech and if they don’t use your tech, there’s no way they can have customer conversations about it.”

Given the current state of the global economy, providing customers with a satisfying digital experience is more important than ever. “We want to keep [customers] happy,” Jimenez says, “And not just customers but employees…because at the end of the day… if you’re not supporting people, there’s no point in putting more technology out there.” Findlay agrees. After all, it’s people who are the drivers of ROI when it comes to tech investments. And when customers embrace a bank’s tech and transition away from branch use to these digital transactions, the banks stand to see a major reduction in the costs of processing those transactions.

But the responsibility for effective digital transformation shouldn’t fall solely on frontline employees. Leaders within the organization need to be the driving force behind adoption. And that’s where gamification can have a major impact on motivating leaders to embrace and model the use of new digital products. Jimenez says, “Gamification can take someone [in leadership] who’s not interested in the topic, who doesn’t see it as impactful to their job because they’re the head of mortgage, for instance, and then suddenly they’re a champion of the system and really understand how it works.” That kind of top-down embracing of a product, a piece of software or a particular user experience can greatly drive literacy throughout the organization.

And that literacy has a direct impact on the bottom line. Findlay explains this notion through the lens of an agent in the contact center. Improved literacy means that agent is better equipped to walk customers through transactions, shortening talk time, improving the customer experience, and ultimately making the agent experience much less stressful (which can limit employee attrition).

Right now, it’s time to familiarize yourself with the full Silo Busting conversation. Get clicking!

Host: Mo Banjoko
Engineer: Kyp Pilalas
Producer: Scott MacAllister
Executive Producer: Ken Gordon