N26. Keep your money moving.

N26 is a rapidly growing financial technology company headquartered in Berlin, Germany. As a fully licensed bank, they offer a variety of financial products, including checking and savings accounts, debit cards, investment products, and insurance policies. N26 has grown rapidly and now has over 7 million customers across 25 European markets.

Role: Product Designer
Team: Assistance (Desing Lead, PM, Native Engineers)

Status: Launched
Year: 2022

⚠️Please note that I am under an NDA for this project, which strictly prohibits me from disclosing any confidential information. As a result, I can only provide a general description of the activities I conducted without divulging any sensitive details. For a complete case study of this project, please contact me.

Support Availability

Situation

N26 offers various support products, including real-time service availability updates. Due to rapid expansion, there was a significant increase in customer wait times to connect with agents via chat, resulting in customer frustration and a perception that N26 did not value their time. The goal was to build trust and reduce negative perceptions by increasing transparency around support availability.

Task

To address the lack of transparency in live help, the aim was to keep customers informed of service availability to reduce frustration and improve overall customer satisfaction. The task involved exploring customer psychology regarding wait times, conducting research, and proposing solutions to enhance transparency.

Action

01. Discovery and Definition

Problem Statement:

Identified that lack of transparency in live help led to user frustration, repeated contact attempts, poor customer service, increased costs, and reduced support efficiency.

Goal:

To keep customers informed of service availability, limiting friction in the customer service journey.

Research:

Conducted thorough desk research and comprehensive competitor analysis to understand customer psychology and how other companies address similar issues.

Findings Presentation:

Compiled detailed notes and presented findings to the team and stakeholders to define the area of opportunity.

Scoping:

Defined project scope, short-term and long-term objectives, specific tasks, and deliverables. Identified potential challenges and prepared to address them.

02. Ideation

Brainstorming Session:

Conducted an ideation session with six team members to generate ideas for addressing the problem statement.

Strengths Identification:

Reflected on existing strengths and built upon them during the ideation process.

Hypotheses Development:

✏️Hypothesis 1: Display wait time once the chatbot is initiated to encourage users to interact more with the chatbot.

✏️Hypothesis 2: Display wait time right before the live chat with a specialist to make users more attentive and willing to wait.

03. Conceptualization

➡️Scenario 1: Display wait time as soon as the user opens the chat (web or mobile) to see if the user decides to wait or leave with high waiting times and understand if they engage with self-support (bonus learning)
➡️Scenario 2: Display wait time after the user asks the bot to connect with a human and see how they engage with the chat

04. Testing

Found that Hypothesis 1 was confusing as users forgot the wait time displayed at the beginning by the time they needed human support.

Design Principles:

✨Inform users about the estimated wait time only when they ask to get connected to an agent.

✨For wait times longer than 3 minutes, keep users updated on the remaining time.

05. Review & Launching

Interaction Flows:

Created interaction flows and aligned with the chatbot team to incorporate them into the chatbot flow.

Result

🥇User Experience Improvement: The revised approach to displaying wait times improved user satisfaction by setting clear expectations and reducing frustration.

🥇Increased Transparency: Informing users about wait times when they requested human support built trust and improved the perception of N26 valuing their time.

🥇Future Enhancements: Recognized the issue’s complexity, with plans to further invest in transparency regarding live support availability in the mid to long term.

Final thoughts

This topic turned out to be more complex than we originally anticipated. As a team, we had to delve deeper into the issue to understand it better. We quickly realized that the key to success was to be more transparent with our users about the availability of live support. This involved not only ensuring that our users knew when live support was available but also addressing some of the ambiguities surrounding the issue.

As we explored the topic further, we identified several related issues that we had not previously considered. These included the need to improve our communication channels with customers, as well as to develop better training materials for our support staff. We also realized that we needed to take a more proactive approach when it came to identifying and addressing customer pain points.

From a personal perspective, this project has made me more comfortable and confident in collaborating with people outside of my team. It has also helped me boost my research skills, particularly in the preparation phase.
If I were to repeat the project, I would spend more time on planning and scoping to improve both my own and my team’s efficiency.