Improving Customer Satisfaction and Retention at HSBC

CLIENT

HSBC

INDUSTRY

Financial Services

ROLE

UX design lead

Project background

As the seventh-largest bank in the world, with around 40 million personal banking customers globally, HSBC was growing increasingly concerned about consistently low levels of customer satisfaction.

At the same time, the banking industry faced relentless threats—from cyberattacks to fraud—impacting both businesses and individuals. Strengthening account security was top priority.

Meanwhile, challenger banks still in their infancy were demonstrating just how seamless and user-friendly banking could be.

Problem

How might we improve the customer satisfactions scores and reduce the number of calls to the customer contact centre in relation to log on, registration and reset journeys.

Key challenges

Consistently low customer satisfaction scores – driven by outdated digital experiences and slow response to evolving user expectations.

Cumbersome log-on experience – the login journey was often slow, unreliable, and prone to forced and unforced errors, frustrating users at the every touchpoint.

Increasing cybersecurity threats – raising concerns about trust, data protection, and financial loss for both the bank and its customers.

Challenger banks, though the number of people switching at this point was low, they had raised the bar significantly and bridging the gap was absolutely vital

Objectives

Improve Customer Experience – Deliver simpler, faster, and more intuitive digital interactions

Enhance Security – Introduce visible and seamless security measures to boost trust whilst improving usability

Reduce the number of calls to the call centre in relation to registration, log on, and reset journeys

Improve brand reputation and customer perception

RESEARCH & DISCOVERY

Insights and data

There was a wealth of data available from the contact centre going back years. From this it was clear to see where customers were having difficulties in specific journeys.

In addition, we could see from the data where there was friction in the journeys and what journeys were proving difficult by the time taken to complete them.

Average time to log in - Challenger versus HSBC (2017)

CHALLENGER BANK

6 seconds

HSBC

120 seconds

Focus

Redesign online registration journey

Redesign log on and reset journeys for online banking.

Migrate customers from legacy system to newer paltform, changing the way they log on

Redesign the provisioning and log on journeys for the mobile app (iOS and Android)

Way of working

Working under a Product Operating Model, in an agile environment, we worked on continuous discovery alongside delivery in quarterly PIs and following core agile practices like stand-ups, sprint planning, and retrospectives.

Development teams were off shore so regular cadence was imperative to ensure transparency and good relations.

Success measures

Increase in customer satisfaction scores (NPS, UKCSI).
Growth in digital engagement (logins, feature usage).
Reduction in the time taken to log on to access accounts - 50%
Reduction in number of calls to call centre relating to log on issues - 5%
Reduction in time required to create an account
Increase in mobile banking adoption over online banking

Strategic actions

Introduce biometric authentication to streamline login, reduce friction, and enhance security.
Grow mobile banking usage while reducing use on online banking with the 'hard token'
Reduce emphasis on hard token and promote mobile authentication
Migrate customers on legacy framework to enable security updates

Approach

Key data from customer contact centre highlighted key problem areas for users. Specifically log on and reset journeys was the most challenging.
Undertook research to evaluate current problems customers were having accessing their accounts
Generated user personas based on users interviewed
Workshops with cross functional team to ensure whole team aware of the problems and needs identified
Worked on both streams (online and mobile banking) simultaneously as there was separate engineering teams for each
Wireframe and prototype solutions for testing, either internally or externally with customers where appropriate
Redesign the provisioning journey and log on using native adaptive patterns, ensuring alignment with approved global patterns to ensure standardised identity approach - enabling seamless, secure customer experiences
Regular in person moderated user testing days were planned in so we could identify points of friction in the proposed journeys and validating the designs
Hand off

Outcome

These were global changes, but were first rolled out to roughly 1 million customers in India. Through the redesign of the provisioning journey, log on and reset journeys we were able to see benefits of:

Reduction in time to log on from over 2 mins to less than 30 seconds (online banking)
Started first phase of the eliminating the Hard Token and replacing with the digital token
Increase in use of mobile banking, providing customers greater security and faster access to accounts (61% in India 2017 to 2020)
Time to install and provision new app duration less than 1 minute
Reduction in time to register (online banking)
A 37% increase in new customers (India 2017 - 2020)