Work on mistakes with customer research.

Research is an integral part of the product development process, capable not only of finding and fixing invisible or non-obvious problems, but also of radically changing the vector of product development.

In our case, the research involved two products, similar in functionality but different in scale and importance to the company, so methods and hypotheses flowed seamlessly from one service to the other.

Complex fintech research is an opportunity to see your own processes and products through customers' eyes, to understand what difficulties and inconveniences users face today, what are the consequences and what actions need to be taken to provide customers with a better and more modern service.

More often than not, fintech research is needed to: Identify unworkable or unused scripts or products; Identify inconvenient or unclear processes for the customer; Identify the customer profile, the target audience for the product or service.

Studying existing banking processes and a typical user profile helps: Prioritise the products and features that a particular user needs; Test processes and interfaces on audiences, understand the most critical issues and highlight changes that can be implemented quickly and with great impact; Accelerate engagement and understanding of the product, build «Friendliness» perceptions; Understand what's on the market, how much it costs and what problems aren't closed to find a new value and price proposition.

There are different ways of conducting research, but the most common are: In-depth interviews; Usability tests; Mystery shopping; Shadowing.

Before forming the objectives and describing the research methodology, it was necessary to understand whether we could manage on our own or whether it would be more convenient to involve someone from outside.

Searches and enquiries of the bank respondents have not given positive results, absolutely all the information about the clients was either under NDA which leads to stretching the already tight deadlines, or completely unavailable for data safety reasons, cutting off all communication with the clients.

Outsourcing was chosen, to be more precise Angry.LLC. We had a few meetings with them and received an offer which was not satisfactory for us, both in time and cost.

But soon McKinsey & Company came to our search, with the right team, tools, respondents and an attractive offer that we simply could not refuse.

The team that joined us immediately began by discussing research methods and objectives.

While we initially understood that we would only need in-depth interviews on business registration and usability tests on two products, the objectives were a little more complicated.

The bottom line was that we needed to: Assess VTB Start's current customer journey, pains and opportunities for improvement; Evaluate the usability and completeness of the upgraded VTB Start service; Understand the advantages or disadvantages of the functionality/interface of competing remote business registration services to improve the bank's internal solution.

When discussing the sample interview route, we agreed on the idea of not dividing sessions into in-depth interviews and usability tests, but to try to fit both methods into one meeting, if possible, in order to collect maximum data and reduce overall research time.

Flow of in-depth interviews represented: Introductions (Which included introducing and explaining the purpose of the interview, setting up the software, notifying the formality of the interview and requesting a recording); Narrative of the business from the respondent (Reasons for setting up and registering the company, opening a current account and presence at other banks as an individual); Main part with focus on details of business registration (Time spent for registration, stages, choosing the service, filling in the data and uploading documents, submitting documents to the tax authorities and their signing with the Enhanced Qualified Electronic Signature); General impressions from using the service (What you liked, what was especially useful and valuable, were there any wow-moments, and what was missing and could have made the experience better); Functionality hypothesis test, which was not discussed in the main part (More precisely, were there any questions to the service specialists' support and was there a need to contact the technical support, how did you choose the form of taxation and consulted earlier, were there any non-banking gifts offered when opening an account and was it important when choosing the service, and was there any experience with the chat-bot).

The usability test, which is the testing of a production/stage version or even a prototype, involved going through a customer journey, during which the interviewer had to ask questions to evaluate the usability, intuitiveness and functionality of the service.