At Wealthify, we’re on a mission to make investing accessible to everyone. And we do that by putting our customers at the heart of everything we do – from how we design our app, to communicating about their investments.
As it’s National Customer Service Week, I thought it would be a fantastic opportunity to tell you about how our everyday interactions with customers allow us to understand what changes to make to provide the best possible investing experience.
Opening the conversation
One of our core principles at Wealthify is that ‘we thrive on feedback’. This runs across everything we do, from our teams’ having regular retrospectives, to hosting testing parties and demos for getting customer feedback. This helps us to understand what we could do to improve our service and deliver a better experience for our customers.
Like most things, our customer feedback is varied and dynamic. It could come from a Trustpilot reviews or naturally pop up in any of the daily conversations with our brilliant Customer Care team – in fact, the latter is where a lot of our great ideas or hot fixes come from.
Every email, Live Chat, and phone call with our Customer Care team has the potential for delivering valuable feedback. And this happens whether the customer knows it or not! Say we have several customers asking about a similar issue, our team will flag this so that we can look to improve this process. After all, we know that for every customer that asks a question or raises a concern, there’s probably a quite few who don’t.
Human Centered Design
To deliver the best experience, we take an approach called “Human Centered Design”. The idea is simple – we use feedback to build a service that works the way the people who use it expect it to work. We act on this by working closely together – with the Customer Care team feeding directly into our Product and Development teams to provide feedback, or suggest ways to improve, enhance, or create new journeys that better support our customers’ needs.
But to get this right, we take a more active role than just listening to what customers are telling us. We hold dedicated sessions to speak to our customers about the products we’ve built, or are thinking of building, to understand how they feel about them. Ultimately, we want to know whether our product really answers their questions or helps to give them more confidence in managing their money.
Our latest developments
I’m proud to say that despite the impact of the pandemic, we’ve still managed to speak to loads of our customers to find out what they really want from Wealthify - that includes surveying thousands of people, speaking directly to hundreds of customers, and building a database with more than 1,500 customer testers ready to be called on for their opinions.
All these touchpoints have helped us to build tools that our customers want. Whether they’re directly helping with questions about money or answering some of the most frequently asked questions we get such as, “I know how much my pension pots are worth, but I don’t know if it’s enough”. So, to help with this, we built a Pension Calculator that gives a breakdown of how much you could have in your pension pot and what you might need for your perfect retirement.
And these are just examples of two standalone features we’ve built recently. This approach has also helped us change how we think about our existing products and what we can do to help our customers have a better conversation about money.
So, what’s to come?
This year, we’ve also been working hard on re-designing our investment app to make it more accessible for users with additional needs while improving the overall look and feel for everyone who uses it. Part of this development includes beta testing with a selection of our customers and allowing live feedback in the app that can provide more direction and suggestions to our team.
And this is just the start. We’re about to embark on some of the widest-ranging customer conversations we’ve ever had, with the sole purpose of enhancing our service even further. This will be the biggest single piece of research into money we've done to date, and we’re going into it with no focus on any of our products or features. We'll be interviewing people about how they think about their money and how saving/investing makes them feel. This is going to be a huge piece of research, and we’ll be talking with thousands of people across the UK.
By keeping our customers at the heart of what we do, we hope that we can offer a service that helps to inspire more people to take the first step towards building their financial future.
Please remember the value of your investments can go down as well as up, and you could get back less than invested.
