Greg Kihlström

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S6 | 528: The role of design in shaping the customer experience with Kaaren Hanson, Chief Design Officer at Chase

Basil Ali
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About the Episode

We are living in an era where customer experience is paramount, and the role of design in shaping that experience cannot be overstated. Joining us today to explore this concept as well as how an organization operationalizes a seamless end-to-end customer experience, is Kaaren Hanson, Chief Design Officer at Chase.

About Kaaren Hanson

Kaaren Hanson is the Chief Design Officer for Consumer and Community Banking at JPMorgan Chase. She is an award-winning design leader with over two decades of industry experience and previously held executive roles at Facebook, Medallia, Intuit, and Wells Fargo. Kaaren is dedicated to delivering world-class experiences that drive business results and is obsessed with emotion and how to change company cultures to be more customer-centric. 

Kaaren is a graduate of Stanford University and occasionally speaks at her alma mater and the California College of the Arts. She is a Board Advisor and Founding Member at the Design Executive Council, and a former KPCB Design Fellow. Her team's successes have been highlighted in Harvard Business Review, Bloomberg Business Week, LA Times, and Inc Magazine.

She currently resides in the San Francisco Bay Area and makes a point of eating dark chocolate every day.

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Transcript

Please note: this was AI-generated and only lightly edited so there may be errors.

Greg Kihlström:
We're living in an era where customer experience is paramount and the role of design and shaping that experience cannot be overstated. Joining us today to explore this concept as well as how an organization operationalizes a seamless end-to-end customer experience is Kaaren Hanson, Chief Design Officer at Chase. Karin, welcome to the show.

Kaaren Hanson: Thanks so much for having me.

Greg Kihlström: Yeah, looking forward to having this conversation with you. Why don't we get started with you giving a little background on your journey to becoming Chief Design Officer at Chase and what that role entails.

Kaaren Hanson: Yeah, so I earned a PhD in social psychology with a heavy emphasis on statistics many years ago. And from there, I started to work in various technology companies. And a lot of it was really around how do we make sure that we're really thinking about the customers and their mental models as we're creating experiences. And over time, I started to manage larger and larger teams. When I was at Intuit, I also drove a shift in the culture so that the company as a big company started to consistently create great experiences. And in doing that, I worked very closely with Brad Smith, our CEO, and Scott Cook, our founder. And then from there, I went to a variety of other companies, always really thinking about how is it that we create conditions in which our teams are consistently creating great experiences for our customers. So that's really what my role is. And I've been doing it now at a variety of different companies, and I'm just thrilled to be at Chase.

Greg Kihlström: That's wonderful. Well, yeah, let's dive in here then. So we're going to start by Talking about the evolution of design and customer focused approach. Those of us in the industry know, you know, the design industry itself has gone undergone significant changes over the years. So let's talk about how some of these changes have influenced Chase's approach to design and how they focus on customer needs. So to that end, you know, how have you seen that evolution in the design industry? And how has this evolution influenced the approach that you use at Chase?

Kaaren Hanson: Yeah, so I would say that, you know, design often, often people who are in companies that are a little bit more immature on that dimension, you hear about people talking about, well, get the creative or make it gorgeous, right? It tends to be very much visual. And then as organizations start to become more mature, it becomes much more about, well, how might we solve this flow? Or even better, how might we solve this problem? And even more impactful is really starting to think more strategically about those experiences in the business. And so, you know, when you look at any company, you can put a company on this continuum, you can put a team on this continuum, you can put a person on this continuum. And a lot of our job as designers is to help the environments or the companies in which we work to move up that continuum. Because you can add value by making something visually appealing, but you're certainly not going to add nearly as much value as solving the actual problem.

Greg Kihlström: Yeah, and that's really design in the broader sense of the term as well, which I think is certainly brings a lot of value that I know we're going to talk about here. And I did want to you mentioned your PhD in social psychology as well. And I thought, that's certainly an interesting component here. How do you think about that? And how do you incorporate those psychological principles into your design strategy, so that you can then end up with greater customer engagement, greater customer satisfaction, things like that?

Kaaren Hanson: Well, one of the things I think is really important is that, you know, technology changes very, very quickly, but our brains do not change very, very quickly. And so the way that people are operating today is largely similar to how the brains operated before. So you have to think a lot about the ratio of negative to positive information, for example, or you can think about what is it that helps people to feel really good. There are certain vectors that consistently do that. For example, spending time with close family and friends. If something exceeds your expectation, that tends to elicit positive emotion. If something is aligned to your values and what you care about, that also elicits positive emotion. So those, those elements of being human don't change over time. Although because technology changes quite significantly and because some of our habits change over time, we differ in how we manifest the experiences that will consistently elicit value for our customers, as well as making it easy for them to use, as well as in most cases, helping them to feel pretty darn good.

Greg Kihlström: Yeah, yeah. And, you know, you mentioned technology trends and certainly there's a few things going on at all times, but AI is certainly one of those that's top of mind and things like generative AI getting a lot of the oxygen, so to speak. But how do you see the role of AI, you know, whether it's generative, whether it's other types of AI in relation to enabling better design?

Kaaren Hanson: Yeah, I think it goes back to really what is the problem that we're trying to solve. And so we're doing some pilots across JPMorgan Chase in many, many areas, but one of them is really largely around summarizing the information that some of our call center agents have access to. And so are we able to use AI to summarize that information in such a way that they're better able to give the customers the answers more quickly? Does that help the agent to feel more confident? Does that help the customer to get the accurate answer more quickly? That just is a tool for solving that problem. We are also looking at doing some pilots around some of the generative visual AI. Like, could we train the model in our branding style so that, you know, some of the, you know, the illustrations could be generated? Maybe, maybe not, but we're going to pilot it and play with it. Again, there's always going to be a human involved. It's just a question of would it be possible for us to become a little bit more efficient in that manner, or frankly, even come up with some new ideas?

Greg Kihlström: Yeah, yeah. And so you mentioned early on about, you know, when a lot of people hear the word design, they think, you know, purely visual, I think you've already touched on, you know, process design and some of the other, you know, broader aspects of design, but, you know, balancing those aesthetics with usability certainly is a critical thing for those, you know, really engrossed in design and understanding it in the broader sense. I want to talk a little bit about, you know, how form and function are addressed together. So, you know, could you discuss a little bit about, you know, how do you, how do you look at both form and function and creating effective user experiences at Chase?

Kaaren Hanson: Yeah, so I think that when you think about, again, solving the problem, you want to make sure that people are able to get the value that they're looking for because they're coming to us because they want to do some type of a job. And so how do we make sure they're able to do their job successfully? And then how are we able to make sure they do their job successfully and quickly and easily and that they feel good? And so when you think about that, some of the way that you make sure people can do their job successfully is by deciding what is most prominent, right, on that screen, or what is diminished so that something else surfaces as more prominent. And so there's a lot of the work around that as well. And then of course that visual design is still important, even though it is not the most impactful, it is still a way of helping people feeling soothed or of helping them to feel very calm or to help them notice when something should be looked at pretty closely because there may be a problem that they need to solve. And so again, it's just being very thoughtful and deliberate, largely about what are you making prominent versus not and what are the feelings you're trying to evoke so that people can best process the information they need to in order to get their job done.

Greg Kihlström: I want to ask about the measurement of this, and so maybe in two parts here. You mentioned essentially prioritizing what does go first and why. What's the role of metrics and analytics in that process?

Kaaren Hanson: Oh my gosh, metrics are so darn important to me. So I think metrics are critical in part because it's useful to align the broader team. So designers, we never do anything alone. We always do our work in conjunction with engineering and product management and data science and often marketing as well. And because of that, having a metric against which we're all measuring ourselves collectively is critical for alignment. And often the measures that I'm looking at are things like, what are our customers' success rates at trying to get done what they're trying to do? Or what is the value that we're adding? And so there's an example of credit score. What we found is that, you know, people have a deep interest in figuring out their credit score and they often want to improve their credit score. And so the team, the metric for success that they chose was, did they improve people's credit scores? right, which is the right metric to go after. We were able to have that empowered team come up with a whole bunch of different ways they might solve that problem. And what they ultimately realized is the people who went through the the planner who did all the activities that were suggested, they actually increased their credit score by over 30 points. Right. And that's how we measure our success, for example.

Greg Kihlström: Yeah, I mean, I think that's an amazing way of looking at it, because it truly is. customer centric and user centric when you're looking at that versus, I mean, I'm sure that there are other metrics that you're looking at, like click throughs and, and other things on the, on the way to that, that credit score. But I think it's the idea that the end measure of success is the customer succeeding.

Kaaren Hanson: Absolutely. And I will tell you often click throughs are simply vanity metrics. I feel like they're noise as opposed to the actual outcome. And I'll give you just another example. So when someone does something like deposit a check, which people still do today, the goal is not that they deposit that check. The goal is that they're able to access the money that was in that check. And so again, like how are you really looking at what the customer is trying to do? And so what we're measuring is time to have access to my funds.

Greg Kihlström: Yeah, yeah, I love that. And so to that end, you know, last topic I want to talk about with you is you know, just like people are depositing checks and they're going in branches and somewhere online. And, you know, we're, we're living in this, this omnichannel world and, you know, customers are, are using the tools in front of them or that are most convenient for them. And so, you know, brands certainly need to be able to adapt to that and, and not only adapt and have the ability to, access, but actually have a cohesive customer experience around that. So I want to want to talk a bit about that with you. And you know, how have you How have you looked at this from an internal perspective of, you know, aligning teams so that, you know, I, I talk with a lot of companies and the, the, the cliche is the siloed teams and, you know, disconnected from, from the inside out almost. So, you know, how, how have you looked at aligning teams around this, you know, sort of inside out as, as far as aligning seamless end to end customer experience?

Kaaren Hanson: Yeah, absolutely. And what I'll say is that every organizational structure has incredible strengths and also incredible weaknesses. And so there are reason that whatever company has the organizational structure that they do, and inevitably there's going to be a huge downside, which is often that end to end experience. So there's a couple of tools that we've been going after. So first of all, it's been using something called a service design blueprint. We make sure that service design blueprint is omni-channel. And what we're really looking at is what is the customer doing, right? They're trying to get a job done. Okay, what are they doing in the app? Then when they call the call center, what are the actors, if you will, or the agents in that call center doing? What does the first level agent do? What does the second level agent do? What are the actual scripts that they're using in those cases? Do they make sense given what the person was doing digitally or not? What happens when they actually go into the branch? What is the banker able to do? What is their supervisor able to do? Who is able to resolve this problem? And where are the gaps? And by creating that service design blueprint, we do it with our colleagues in all of the channels. That also allows everybody to see what we have collectively created. And sometimes in the past, because that was created in silos, it doesn't make sense as an overall experience. But again, by having that service design blueprint, we can all look at it and say, holy cow, we need to do better. Let's figure out what our metric is for success. And then we can start to align our roadmaps on how we can really take this to the next level. So there's a lot of working with those teams, making sure the experience is paramount. And again, creating those artifacts that allow us to all see what we are collectively creating for our customers. Because right now we are creating experiences. The question is, were they deliberately designed?

Greg Kihlström: Yeah. Yeah. I love that perspective there. And from that, from that perspective, then how do you measure success from from that internal perspective? I mean, definitely, certainly customer success is part of that. But you know, how do you every organization, you know, there's lots of people out there listening and, you know, in large orgs and, you know, and smaller, in some cases, but you know, how do you how should they be looking at measuring success as you know, they've got to start somewhere. But, you know, how do you how do you look at incremental improvements, I guess?

Kaaren Hanson: Yeah, I mean, what I would say is when you're in a large organization, you do have to start somewhere and there are going to be some people who are more ready to play than others. And you don't have to get everybody on board. You have to figure out which teams are really ready to go. A lot of people care about the customer experience. A lot of people know that what they're doing now is just a sliver and that the overall probably isn't great. And so again, you figure out who's ready to play, and then you start to look across. And then you try to make sure that your broader operating mechanisms in the company are reinforcing that end-to-end experience. And so, for example, we've changed some of our reports that go up to actually look at that end-to-end customer experience. Which again, if that's what the leaders are looking at, that's what's getting visibility, that's going to really orient people's behavior. My other way of looking at this is to look at the employee engagement and to see, are employees proud of what they're creating? Are they proud of the end-to-end experience they're creating? The knowledge is usually on the ground and on the teams. Now the tricky part is what gets surfaced up to executives tends to get a little bit rosier every single time, right? So what we're starting to pilot right now is really having those quads that, you know, design, the engineer, the product manager, and the lead data scientist, have them report how proud are they of this experience before we launch. Then they start to learn over time, were they right or were they wrong?

Greg Kihlström: Yeah, yeah. Well, and to that end, you know, it's a, it's, in my experience, it's, it's definitely it's a process of continuous improvement, right? So it's not just, you know, you get over, over a hurdle, and then, you know, it's like, set it and forget it or something like that. But But have you noticed, like, once you do get past some kind of proof points or something, is it easier to then get the next group of people or cohort or however you look at it.

Kaaren Hanson: Absolutely. Once you get a couple of successes, there's much more of like, wait, especially when you get those successes and you celebrate them broadly, right at a very high level, more and more people want to start to operate that way. And then you start to see teams do do even more inspirational, amazing things. I'll tell you, our self-driven investments team, who is just doing a phenomenal job and reimagining that part of the app. And I'll tell you that they were number one digital experience by J.D. Powers for self-driven investment in the past year and whatnot. They're still continuing to improve. And right now, what they're doing is they're like, these screens are going to be so darn good. We're going to put them as artwork on the walls because that's how proud we're going to have to be of the experience we created. which is a high bar, right? And that's really inspiring.

Greg Kihlström: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And so, you know, what do you as with your role as chief design officer, you know, how do you, you know, you've mentioned a few things here, but, you know, just wondering if you could elaborate, like, how do you keep our help keep the teams motivated and, and stuff, you know, to keep doing things like you're saying, like to continually improve and be motivated?

Kaaren Hanson: Yeah. So I really see my job as, as operating at three levels. One is I need to develop a world-class design team. Right. And so I feel, I feel like we're, we're very, very far along with that. And we've grown fairly significantly. When I joined, we were about 250 or 300 and now we're a good thousand people. And we've brought in a lot of very senior designers and a lot of big variety of designers from service design all the way to, you know, prototyping and et cetera. And then at the second level, my job is to make sure that our quads are operating in a customer-centric manner. And so what are the practices that we're using across the board? How is engineering and design and product and data, how are we all working together? And so we use things like the Y template. And now several of our CEOs are only funding initiatives that have the why template completed. And the why template is essentially a customer problem statement. What is the customer trying to do? What is the problem? How does that make them feel? And how are we going to measure success? And so that, for example, is a really important mechanism. And again, once teams are focused on a customer problem, that is inherently reinforcing because most people, nearly all people, want to do right by customers. We want to help other people to do well. And then finally, what are the broader operating mechanisms in the broader company? And that, again, goes back to where we're starting to look at the success rates of these customer journeys. That's very, very important because it reinforces everything else. And then there are, of course, other methods. For example, we do have an Empowered Team Award. We have a Crafty Fox Award for the design team that is truly doing superlative craft. And so there are a lot of other ways as well of recognizing this. We have built this in to the job expectations across the firm. We have some career pathways in which this is also built in. And then, of course, it is about the questions that the leaders are asking, right? That actually is one of the most powerful forces we have.

Greg Kihlström: Yeah, yeah, that's great. Well, Kaaren, thanks so much for joining. One last question before we wrap up here. Certainly you're seeing a lot of trends as well as helping to shape the future of design. What do you see as some of these forces shaping the future of design, whether it's in the banking industry or in general, and how are you helping to prepare to adapt to these changes?

Kaaren Hanson: Yeah, I mean, I would just say that, you know, at a broader level, people are increasingly expecting their experiences to be personalized. They expect them to have a clear benefit. They expect to be feeling confident. They expect to have some moments of delight. I would say that, you know, when you look at the level of end-to-end experiences that are out there, you know, you see a lot of great work done, you know, even like say by Rivian, the Tesla end-to-end experience is amazing. And so there are a lot of brands out there that are really paving the way and setting those expectations as they're becoming more ubiquitous, not to say that Rivian or Tesla are actually ubiquitous yet at all, but they are certainly starting to shift a lot of those trends and those expectations. Thanks so much for having me. It was really a pleasure.

Greg Kihlström: Yeah, it was great to talk with you. Again, I'd like to thank Kaaren Hanson, Chief Design Officer at Chase for joining the show.

Kaaren Hanson, Chief Design Officer, Chase