Building investor confidence with Bell Direct

Investing in the future has never been more critical, but at the same time, confidence in the financial sector has never been lower.

We worked with a client within the financial sector who knew there was a significant proportion of middle-income professionals who had the capital, but not the confidence or impetus to use smart investment as a path to using that capital to build wealth.

They already had a range of exciting and innovative financial services options that would be of enormous benefit to their customer.

To connect those services their customers, they needed to develop a market-leading solution addressed their customer’s fears and gave them the skills and confidence they needed to make the most of their money.

Our job was to make the opaque transparent and turn the ambiguous into the actionable.

The first step in creating a financial service that addresses the concerns of those worried about investing is to fully understand what the customer feels. To do that, we stopped talking and started listening.

Having reviewed all the current customer data held by our client and spoken to critical stakeholders whose insights helped us shape the direction of our research, we started amplifying the voice of the customer.

Through direct research interviews with their customers, we were able to uncover the blockers that were preventing them from making the most of their savings. We reinforced these verbatims with in-depth Net Promoter Score (NPS) research.

Our understanding of these challenges was then refined through eight extensive face-to-face problem interviews that took a deep dive into specific issues.

By listening to the voice of the customer, we were able to uncover and prioritise four main challenges that represent the primary roadblocks between our clients financially independent customers and confident self investing.

Loss aversion was always going to be a challenge when it comes to investing money. Any investment comes with a risk, and that risk is one of the foremost negative impression in the mind of the customer.

Closely connected to loss aversion was the fact that many potential DIY investors felt they didn’t have the required skillset to invest their savings with confidence. Attached to this lack of a money management skill set was a comprehensive lack of trust in financial planners, reducing the potential impact of expert advice.

Finally, customer’s were understandably more attracted to the perception of reliability around saving money versus investing in, adopting a “bird in the hand is worth two in the bush” attitude toward their saved capital.

Developing a deep understanding of these concerns was a vital step in creating a service platform that provided a comprehensive solution to all of them.

Having uncovered the four principal challenges areas and developed detailed insights for each, we worked closely with our client to create a detailed customer value proposition.

Customer value propositions provide a vital framework that, based on insight-rich customer research, allows our clients to create differentiated, valuable, and innovative products and services.

Through in-depth customer research, workshop, and validation sessions, we were able to shine a spotlight on the concerns that were preventing customer from taking advantage of their cutting-edge financial products.

Working with our client, these customer insights were translated into a redesigned customer journey and whole new customer experience that addressed concerns through education, upskilling, support and utterly transparent risk management.

By building a deep understanding of their customers needs and concerns into their service design, our client was able to turn customer insights into definable growth.

Their new service platform, built with our customer-need framework resulted in an 18% growth in funds invested by investors and a 14% growth in new clients over a 12 month period while customer reported 34% increase in perceived lifetime value.