Duration
Nov 2021 — Mar 2022
Scope
CX / UX researches, wireframing, concepts
Context
Banking notifications is a service that Russian banks sell to their clients. Usually bank allows few types of notifications for free, however if you want to get access to all of available notifications, you need to purchase a monthly subscription.
Subscription plans differ significantly amongst the banks, but all of them account for the following factors:
✦ delivery channel (PUSH and / or SMS);
✦ number of cards or products;
✦ types of events that trigger notifications.
At the Bank the difference between paid and free subscription plans is the number of events that bank notifies you about.
Problem
✦ Outflow of paying clients.
Project Objectives
✦ 300k paying clients or money equivalent in the 1st year for increasing of commission income and saving on communication costs via push-messages.
Some Data
✦ The P&L of the product has a negative balance.
✦ 67,7% of clients are on a paid subscription plan, but only 7,4% actually pay the bank because of the historical discounts.
✦ The target audience is only 6,4% of the clients on free plans. The average conversion rate of promotion campaigns is less than 1%.
✦ 47,2% of the paid clients get full or partial discounts on the paid subscription: VIP and premium clients, retirees, salary clients, etc.
✦ 36,2% of the clients deliberately downgrade their subscription plan. The main reason for customer churn is due to lack of money for prolongation.
Process
1. We started with brainstorming our hypotheses on customer pains and potential solutions in series of workshops. We did it to prepare ourselves for the interviews.
2. Interviewed customers from the following client groups:
✦ already on a paid subscription;
✦ never been on a paid subscription;
✦ recently cancelled paid subscription
3. Analyzed the results of interviews and segmented customers based on their pains and their behavior profile.
4. Estimated the number of clients in each segment based on data analysis.
5. Built a mapping of must-have, nice-to-have, do-not-need features for each client segment.
6. Built a financial model for new subscription.
7. Modelled several subscription options and did a series of client tests to see in which more clients choose paid subscription plans.
8. Outlined a roadmap for gradual rollout of a new model.
Key Challenges We Faced
✦ A lot of clients do not see notifications as an additional services, but as an obligation of banks to report to the client. Market made them tolerate the fact that they pay for the service, but did not totally alter “it has to be free” attitude.
✦ The service is not of such a high importance for the majority of clients to take time and choose the subscription model that fits them best.
✦ Clients notice the service of notifications only if it came late or did not come in time. Mostly they do not see any other service difference among the competitors.
Key Results
✦ We found that banking notifications can do more than just notify about your bank account status. The two predominant pains were discovered:
1. Fear of realizing via notification of their money were stolen without being able to prevent it.
2. The need to log in into the banking app to do control your finances and do the analytics there.
✦ The winning concept was the one that offered clients to chose from 3 options. Basically we worsened the previous terms of the old subscriptions and introduced the third one all included package with the new features.
✦ The rollout plan was to start A / B testing new security and financial control features as separate paid services. If the conversion rate made the benchmark, the feature would become a part of the new subscription plan.
