«Thanks to Experience Lab, Bankia has gained relevant insights into how customers relate to us, how they perceive our digital channels, areas for improvement they identify, how they would like our products and services to be…»
Sara Díaz Barroso | Director of Commercial Research at Bankia
Bankia is one of the Spanish banking entities that is strongly committed to improving the customer experience and launching ‘customer-centric’ initiatives. The goal is to value the customer’s voice when making decisions, developing new products, or addressing the challenges they face. Programs like ‘Bankia Fácil’, a plan to get closer to its customers by providing simple and practical solutions to everyday situations, are clear examples of this strategy to make their lives easier and understand their needs firsthand.
To achieve this, Bankia has implemented various actions and projects to respond to new consumer behavior patterns, such as the increasing shift towards digital banking and higher levels of customer expectations. They have also initiated efforts to understand their customers’ voices and develop suitable solutions in the changing banking sector landscape.
Customer behavior in the banking sector has undergone significant transformation in recent years. Values such as immediacy or the promotion of services and bank accounts that allow online-only operations are becoming increasingly common demands among customers. Banks are working to respond to and understand these changes in the bank-customer relationship. These changes have led to measures such as the closure of physical branches and the creation of new products like Bankia’s ‘Cuenta On,’ an online product with no fees aimed at overcoming these challenges and meeting the needs of the new digital consumer.
Technology plays a crucial role in this changing landscape, affecting behaviors and philosophies and serving as a fundamental tool for addressing and overcoming the challenges that the banking sector faces, both in terms of operations and in understanding, measuring, and relating to customer behavior and needs.
«With customers who have a digital profile, it is only natural to interact with them through online tools. Additionally, these tools have undeniable advantages, being more flexible and significantly reducing research times and costs.»
To address the challenges presented by Bankia, We Are Testers, in collaboration with Stiga, a leading company in Customer Experience in the banking and insurance sectors, developed a study based on an Online Community. Through this research tool, the bank could gain a deeper understanding of its digital customers, improve their user experience, and respond to their information needs. This collaboration closely involved Bankia’s research department.
In January 2019, Experience Lab Bankia 2019 was launched, an online community where a selected group of customers—profiled by the bank based on different criteria—participated and provided their opinions in various activities and dynamics organized and managed by a moderator. Stiga played a leading role in moderating the community, as experts in qualitative and quantitative analysis techniques applied to customer knowledge.
But before launching the community, a fundamental prerequisite had to be fulfilled: the selection of the sample—in other words, the audience that would participate in the community and needed to perfectly match the detailed profile specified by Bankia. This selection was made possible through We Are Testers’ user community, which consists of more than 100,000 consumers with over 400 segmentation criteria. As a result, we were able to select participants with a high level of micro-characterization. For example, one of Bankia’s requirements was to have users of Bizum with varying levels of tool usage.
With over 100 selected participants and a customer-centric approach, the Experience Lab Bankia community was launched with various activities. These activities included surveys related to products or functionalities, open discussions about online banking, tasks to evaluate satisfaction with the bank, and more.
The community concluded with very positive feedback from both participants and the bank. Participants expressed gratitude for being able to participate in a co-creation project with the bank and felt that their opinions were taken into account. For the bank, in addition to achieving their information objectives and implementing customer-centric initiatives, Bankia realized that the methodology developed in Experience Lab offered them an advantage in understanding the customer: immediate access and availability of users to provide quick, agile, and interactive responses to their doubts, concerns, information needs, and more.
Thanks to the platform and flexibility provided by Experience Lab, Bankia was able to introduce additional content beyond what was initially planned, based on current events or news affecting the industry. They could also address immediate needs that arose spontaneously or gather customer feedback on various topics within hours.
«We’ve had customers tell us that they now feel truly heard or that their suggestions have been reflected when we’ve launched new digital banking features (for example, including the option to request the PIN online).»
Thanks to the valuable information obtained by Bankia through Experience Lab, the bank developed over 20 projects with customer-centric initiatives and was able to address various objectives:
In addition to these more cross-cutting or strategic objectives, the collaboration between Bankia, Stiga, and We Are Testers offered the bank the possibility to address other more tactical and immediate questions. Thanks to the nature of the methodology used in Experience Lab, which is entirely online, flexible, and agile, Bankia was able to meet information needs much faster compared to more traditional and rigid methodologies.
In conclusion, the use of Experience Lab has provided Bankia with high-value, high-quality insights that have allowed the bank to better understand its customers and undertake projects and strategies in line with their needs and preferences.
Due to the successful results of Experience Lab Bankia 2019 and the satisfaction of both the bank and participants, as well as the close collaboration between both parties, the research project was extended for another year to address new challenges and scenarios in Experience Lab Bankia 2020, a project currently in progress.
Data (or, more precisely, how data is used) can become a significant competitive advantage, allowing us to better understand customers (and non-customers) and personalize the offers we make from Bankia. In this regard, the use of artificial intelligence can help us offer a better customer experience. And, to make these big challenges tangible, we want to continue placing the customer «at the center» of the bank’s strategy.
Update date 22 December, 2023Let your next success story be yours! We offer our technology and market research expertise to help you achieve your goals. Write to us at info@wearetesters.com with your questions or information needs, and we will analyze your case to offer the best solution.
