One of the major areas of growth opportunity at BMO Harris Bank was with a subset of retail customers considered to be “Mass Affluent”, which means that their liquid net worth is between $100,000 and $1,000,000 with an income of over $75,000 per year.
The idea was to create a specialized level of service and services in order to attract new customers in the “Mass Affluent” segment to BMO Harris Bank. A version of the program had been launched at M&I Bank before it was purchased by BMO, but it needed to be updated and re-launched.
My role in the project was the Vice President of Customer Experience Design (CED). I worked as a consultant on a team with internal and external stakeholders to help develop and launch the re-worked program by recommending and providing CED tools, managing those CED tools and collaborating with outside Customer Experience Design groups. Our goal was to better define our target customers, map our customer’s journey, determine our customer’s needs using co-creation sessions as well as targeted focus groups and develop plans for training the Premier teams to provide a consistent and specialized service.
The external stakeholders that I interacted with included specialized customer experience research companies, customers from all over the Midwest and Canada, as well as another BMO entity that is legally separate from the retail bank. The internal stakeholders that worked on the overall project team included leaders from the Legal, Outside Lending, Credit Cards, Deposit Products, Marketing and the Premier Services departments.
To get a better idea of what our customers may want out of the program, I undertook the exercise of mapping a customer’s journey with BMO Harris Premier Services. We created several personas based on our target customer segments. We chose two personas and then mapped out their experiences with BMO Harris from initial contact through their ongoing business as usual contact with our teams.
One big take away from all of our research was the level of autonomy that our customers expected. Given the general demographic of our target customers, we expected that they would come to the relationship with a medium to high level of understanding of banking and investments. But as it turned out, our customers wanted more of a one-stop shop. A place to go where they could go for information and investing advice that they could trust so that they didn’t have to spend the time doing the research themselves.
The final program took about one year to implement from start to re-launch. It is one where Premier customers work with their own specialized financial teams including a Personal Banker and a Financial Analyst in order to best manage their assets for their needs. The program was designed to increase the customer’s overall relationship with the bank thereby increasing the total assets managed by the bank.
This program continues to contribute to BMO’s growth, with an adjusted net income of 6% in 2015 and 7% in 2016.