#AsiaeCommerceAwards highlight: OCBC Securities revamps eStatements with 'wow' factor in mind

The provision of excellent customer experience is no doubt one of the priorities for companies. In order to provide excellent customer experience, it is crucial for companies to provide customer service that add values to customers. As such, OCBC Securities decided to embark on its “eStatements Tranformation” campaign to transform its customer experience by providing them with a ‘wow’ factor. Its effort in this campaign led OCBC Securities to win the bronze Best eCommerce Customer Service at MARKETING INTERACTIVE’s Asia eCommerce Awards 2020.

Challenge

OCBC Securities recognised that eStatements provided to customers might not value-add to its customer service, especially if too many statements were being sent to the same customer every month. It was understood that simply understanding how customers use their statements is not enough as there are various uncovered issues faced by different groups of customers. It is also important to ensure that customers understand the various statements that were being sent to them.

Putting human-centric design into practice, OCBC Securities underwent an intensive study to review each statement using the iterative design process. A cross-functional team was formed to not only review but also seek alignment through the value-chain by conducting customer labs and gathering feedback from internal stakeholders.

The main challenges faced by the team were:

1. The consolidation of multiple statements together to provide customers with a summarised review of their accounts. To do so, 10 statements were shortlisted by frequency of print and evaluated for feasibility of consolidation.
2. How can OCBC Securities help save customers time from ploughing through complicated statement details with a simplified design.
3. How to reduce both customers’ and OCBC Securities’ own carbon footprint by encouraging customers to switch to eStatements.

Strategy

To create statements that not only enhance their service to customers while reducing resources required to produce these statements the cross-functional team at OCBC Securities carefully analysed and selected customer profiles with views and feedbacks that were representative of OCBC Securities’ full clientele that range from individuals to corporates and financial institutions.

The team was able to identify three main customer profiles derived from their analysis of customers who uses their statements for different purposes such as:

1. Corporate customers: This group of customers need the daily statements for reconciliation of accounting entries. The dividend statement is especially important to send to them on a daily basis.

1. Customers group 1: This group of customers only view the statements when necessary and feel that there are too many daily statements. They refer to the platform for the necessary information.

1. Customers group 2: This group of customers are not aware of the statements sent to them and view contract note is most important as it confirms their trades placed.

In general, all customers wanted simpler and clearer statements. They wanted to receive less statements but more quickly.

Personas were then developed based on the above customer profile to be able to empathise with customers and see things from their perspectives. These personas were used consistently in the design and development of eStatements and stakeholder engagement. Through the lens of these personas, the team managed to get buy-in from the stakeholders of the new design, which is vastly different from the previous design.

With an aim to bridge the gap between the perceived customers’ problems versus customers’ actual problems, the team approached customers to gather their feedback on the previous statements and to listen to the various concerns they shared. 

Insights from frontline departments were also collected to understand problems they faced when assisting customers with their statements. It was discovered that many customers found it difficult to reconcile their statements to their trading activities which resulted in the frontline staff having to spend time clarifying with customers, thereby reducing productivity. 

Steering away from the traditional way of designing, the team adopted an iterative design process where each stage of design was followed through with more customer interviews to get feedback on how to further improve it. To ensure that the team was able to develop a solution that would successfully tackle the various problems identified, the team sat down with customers to better understand their feedback for each prototype. 

Execution

The team translated customer feedback into functional and technical specifications that could be incorporated into the new consolidated statements. Turning customer insights into reality, the finalized eStatements consist of clearer descriptions and better segregations that allowed customers to better understand the information. Changes include:

1. Removal of unnecessary information that may confuse customers.
2. Adopting better naming conventions that are understandable to customers and removing unclear abbreviations.
3. Organised and sorted information by type of transaction activities. For example, we created an overview of portfolio and placed it on the first page as a result of inputs by customers.
4. Incorporated various improved design aspects to facilitate readability such as using grey backgrounds to highlight important areas, the addition of lines to make reading information easier and bolding important details for customers.

With these changes made, customers can now simply log into OCBC Securities’ online trading platform; iOCBC trading platform, which will allow them to access confidential information on a secure platform. They will also be able to reconcile their contract on their eStatements to the trade history on the iOCBC trading platform. eStatements will be made available to customers the next day and customers can formulate their trading strategy needed for the same day.

The new monthly e-statement was redesigned and restructured to have logical, multi-layered sections that help customers understand their position and portfolio better. It reorganised information and added elements that allow customers to better track their trading activities and the movement of their cash and assets.

During development, OCBC Securities expanded the project by adding another 23 statements outside the original scope to be consolidated. Another key innovation is the ability to consolidate 27 monthly statements into one and only display the relevant information to each customer, depending on their trading activities and assets. The technical solution involved building modular components that can automatically adjust themselves to achieve a seamless display. The team also consolidated six daily statements into one that used a similar technical solution.

Another major achievement was to have a single design and solution that catered to the needs of all customer profiles. While they have varied needs and use statements for different purposes, the team found some common grounds and incorporated design elements that address their needs. As a whole, customers of a specific profile benefited from feedback given by another profile group. 

Result

The consolidated eStatements proved it success in enhancing customer satisfactions as the eStatements were not only well received by customers but it also increased OCBC Securities’ productivity.

With the consolidated eStatements, customers were significantly happier as they are able to access the eStatements online sooner than hardcopies in a secured manner. Customers can also understand the statement more easily and need not call their Trading Representatives and Customer Service Officers for further clarifications.

OCBC Securities’ customer service officers or trading representatives can then focus on helping customers in other areas such as navigating the platform or getting updates about the stock market. With regards to the new statement design, frontline staff members merely need to briefly introduce the various sections of the statement and customers are able to start using the information for their own various purposes.

Lastly, with the statements being housed on iOCBC trading platform, more customers are starting to familiarise themselves with the other parts of the platform. This helped to resolve other issues that are not related to statements. As part of OCBC Securities’ effort to help customers transit from the old statement design to the new one, OCBC Securities managed to reactivate some dormant accounts and get customers to refresh their trading relationship with them.